A tercet is three lines of poetry, forming a stanza or complete poem. In Poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger Poem. In modern poetry the term is often equivalent with Strophe; in popular vocal music a stanza is A three line stanza. Haiku is an example of an unrhymed tercet poem. is a form of Japanese poetry. Previously called
Other types of tercet include an enclosed tercet where the lines rhyme in an a b a pattern and terza rima where the a b a pattern of a verse is continued in the next verse by making the outer lines of the next stanza rhyme with the central line of the preceding stanza as in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. Terza rima is a rhyming verse Stanza form that consists of an interlocking three line rhyme scheme The Divine Comedy The tercet also forms part of the villanelle, where the initial five stanzas are tercets, followed by a concluding quatrain. A villanelle is a poetic form which entered English-language poetry in the 1800s from the imitation of French models A quatrain is a Poem, or a Stanza within a poem that consists always of four lines
A tercet may also be separate halves of the ending sestet in a petrarchan sonnet where the rhyme scheme is abbaabba cdccdc as in Longfellow's "Cross of Snow. A sestet is the name given to the second division of a Sonnet, which must consist of an octave, of eight lines succeeded by a sestet of six lines " It also ends sestinas where the keywords of the lines before are repeated in a highly ordered form. A sestina (also sextina, sestine, or sextain) is a highly structured Poem consisting of six six-line Stanzas followed by a Tercet