Poetry Hacks

Tricolon

What is it? A three-part structure, where each word or phrase is of roughly equal length; a three-part list. More loosely, the term is sometimes used to refer to a triad, or the rule of three. What effect does it usually have? As every advertiser and politician knows, tricolons have a unique power, rendering phrases more memorable, neater or more resonant. What else should I look out for? Tricolons tend to make the expression of ideas more concise, where relatively complex ideas are compressed into the three-unit form.

An example of how it works … ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by Robert Frost:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep

The temptation felt by the speaker to linger in the snowy woods, which has already been described in some detail, is summarised using a neat tricolon in the final stanza of the poem.

Another example … ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ by John Keats:

The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where ... palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies

These two despairing tricolons express the pain of mortal life for the speaker, underlining the urgency of his desire to fly away with the nightingale, who exists in an entirely different realm; as he says in another resonant tricolon, to 'Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget' what the bird has 'never known'.

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