Ottava rima

Ottava rima is an eight-line stanza with the rhyme scheme abababcc, in which six lines of alternating rhyme conclude with a final couplet of adjacent rhyme. Ottava rima was first used by Giovanni Boccaccio (14th century), and the Italian Renaissance poets Ariosto and Tasso employed it for large narrative epic; it became the classical stanza of the long poem: the first six lines unfold the action, while the concluding couplet sums up or wittily "closes" the stanza. The fixed structure of the ottava demands masterful command of rhyme and compositional rhythm. In Ukrainian poetry ottava rima was used in translations of Renaissance epic and in original poems oriented toward the European classical tradition of fixed stanzaic forms.