Rhyming couplets are pairs of lines that rhyme at the end. Give us a cast of characters and some nouns, and we will write a string of rhyming couplets.
A rhyming couplet is two lines that rhyme with each other. Chained together, couplets produce the rhyme scheme AA BB CC DD, which is why the form is sometimes called "running couplets" or "heroic couplets" when the lines are in iambic pentameter. It is the simplest rhyme unit in English verse and the foundation of a great deal of it: Chaucer used it, Pope built an entire career on polished heroic couplets, and Shakespeare ends each of his sonnets with one.
Because each pair closes its own rhyme, couplets are self-contained. That is their great strength — every two lines can be a complete thought, a joke, a step in an argument or a small scene — and their great weakness, because a run of closed pairs can read as a list of unrelated remarks. The fix is progression: each pair should depend on the pair before it.
Couplets are chains — each pair closes its rhyme and opens the next idea:
There was a sailor and a queen,
who wandered through the fields of green.
The sailor kept a paper chart,
the queen a compass and a heart,
and golden maps lay quietly in between.
They watched a silver heron flying,
and named it a promise after evening.
When morning came softly, they folded the chart,
and carried a green promise from the market.
Read the rhyme moves: queen / green, chart / heart, flying / evening, chart / market. Now read only the first line of each pair and you have a skeleton narrative: sailor and queen wander; the sailor has a chart; maps lie between them; they watch a heron; they name it; morning comes and they fold the chart. That is the test of couplets — the odd lines should tell the story on their own, with the even lines completing the sound.
This page composes eight lines in four rhyming couplets, with the rhyme scheme AABB CCDD. It selects four separate rhyme families from the site's rhyme table and ends each pair of lines on two different words from the same family, then threads your nouns, adjectives and characters through the couplets.
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