What Is a Tricolon?
Quick answer: A tricolon is a set of three parallel words or phrases, from veni, vidi, vici to Lincoln at Gettysburg. Learn how poets put the rule of three to work.
A tricolon is a rhetorical figure in which three parallel words, phrases or clauses arrive in a row, usually sharing the same grammatical shape. The most famous example is Julius Caesar's boast 'veni, vidi, vici': three verbs, three beats, one complete thought. Writers reach for the tricolon because three is the smallest number that can establish a pattern and then close it. Two items feel like a pair or a coincidence. Four items start to feel like a list. Three lands with a click, which is why the figure sounds decisive rather than merely repetitive, and why it turns up everywhere from funeral orations to fridge magnets.
That said, a tricolon is a tool, not a magic spell. Political speechwriting has leaned on it so heavily that a lazy triple can now sound like a press release. In a poem, where every syllable is on show, the figure has to be built with more care: the items need real differences of weight and colour, the order has to be deliberate, and the third element should do something the first two did not. This page covers the classic examples, the useful variations, and how to write triples that feel earned.
The poem
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' (1854)
Why three feels finished
There is an old Latin tag, omne trium perfectum: everything that comes in threes is complete. The intuition behind it is structural. The first item in a series introduces an idea. The second confirms that a pattern exists. The third completes the pattern, and because the reader now expects it, the third slot carries the most rhetorical pressure. That is why the punchline of a joke sits in third position, why fairy tales give the hero three tasks, and why 'location, location, location' says more than 'location' said twice.
For a poet, the practical point is that the third position is where the meaning concentrates. Whatever you put last in a tricolon will be read as the destination of the whole phrase. If the last item is the weakest, the reader feels a small deflation, even if they cannot say why. If it is the strongest, the sentence seems to accelerate as it ends.
Tricolons you already know
Once you learn the name, you start spotting the figure in most of the famous sentences of public life. The Declaration of Independence promises 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness', a rising triple in which the third item is longer and stranger than the first two. Lincoln closed the Gettysburg Address in 1863 with government 'of the people, by the people, for the people', a tricolon in which only the prepositions change, so the repetition of 'the people' becomes the argument itself. Shakespeare gave Mark Antony 'Friends, Romans, countrymen', three nouns that widen in scope, pulling a hostile crowd from intimacy to shared identity in five words.
Memory itself seems to prefer threes. Churchill's famous 1940 offer to the Commons actually named four things, blood, toil, tears and sweat, yet most people misremember it as 'blood, sweat and tears'. The public ear quietly edited a tetracolon down to a tricolon. That small act of collective revision tells you how strong the pull of three really is.
Rising, falling and equal weight
Rhetoricians distinguish a few flavours. A tricolon crescens ascends: each item is longer or heavier than the last, so the sentence builds ('a whisper, a rumour, a full-throated public scandal'). A tricolon diminuens descends, which reads as deflation and suits irony ('a kingdom, a castle, a damp room over the stables'). When all three items match in length almost exactly, the figure overlaps with isocolon, and the effect is chant-like, closer to liturgy than to speech.
The ascending form is the workhorse because it matches how emphasis naturally falls in English. If you write a triple and it sounds flat, the fix is usually mechanical: reorder the items so the longest or most surprising one comes last, and see whether the sentence stands up straighter.
The tricolon in poems
In verse, the tricolon often stretches across whole lines rather than sitting inside one sentence. Tennyson built the terror of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' (1854) on a triple: 'Cannon to right of them, / Cannon to left of them, / Cannon in front of them'. The three matched lines surround the reader exactly as the guns surround the riders; the grammar performs the geography. Whitman worked the same muscle at greater length, letting catalogues run far past three, but even his longest lists tend to group in triples when he wants a passage to close.
Here is the figure at working scale. A flat draft line might read: 'The house was cold and quiet.' A tricolon revision: 'The house was cold, quiet, and patient.' The first two adjectives are ordinary sense impressions; the third is a small act of personification, and because it arrives in the loaded third slot, it lands as the point of the line rather than as decoration. That is the pattern to steal: two items establish the ground, the third turns.
Tricolon, anaphora, hendiatris: keeping the labels straight
Neighbouring terms overlap and get confused, so it is worth separating them. A tricolon is about the number and parallelism of the items: three matched units. Anaphora is about repetition of an opening word or phrase across successive clauses or lines, and it can run for two items or twenty. The two figures often combine, as when Tennyson repeats 'Cannon' at the head of each line, but neither requires the other.
Hendiatris is a narrower cousin: three words used to express one idea, as in 'wine, women and song' or the King James phrase 'eat, drink, and be merry'. In a hendiatris the three items are not really separate claims; together they name a single attitude. Knowing the difference matters when you revise, because a hendiatris can afford near-synonyms, while a true tricolon usually wants three genuinely distinct items.
Building one that does not sound like a speech
The tricolon's danger in contemporary poetry is slickness. Judges and editors read hundreds of poems, and a glossy triple can smell of the podium. A few habits keep the figure honest. First, check that all three items deserve their place; the commonest fault is a padded third item added only to complete the rhythm, and cutting a fake third is one of the fastest edits in revision. Second, decide about conjunctions on purpose. Dropping the 'and' (asyndeton, as in 'veni, vidi, vici') makes the triple faster and colder; adding 'and' between every item (polysyndeton) slows it into ceremony. Third, let the third item swerve. A triple that ends somewhere the reader did not expect, in tone or in scale, feels discovered rather than manufactured.
It helps to remember what the figure is for. Contest scorers, including Writory's judges working through their five criteria, respond to language that has shape without visible effort. A tricolon that reads as inevitable earns that response; a tricolon that reads as technique announces itself and gets in the poem's way.
What poets can take from this
- Put the longest or most surprising item last; the third slot is where readers look for the point.
- Cut any third item that exists only to fill the rhythm, then see if a true third suggests itself.
- Try the triple with no conjunctions, then with 'and' everywhere, and keep the version that matches the poem's temperature.
- Use two literal items and one figurative item to make the figure turn instead of merely repeat.
- Read the sentence aloud with the items in all six possible orders before settling.
- Ration yourself: one strong tricolon per poem is emphasis, three is a verbal tic.
Try it yourself
Write a short poem in which every stanza ends on a tricolon, but make each triple do a different job: one that builds, one that deflates, and one whose third item changes the poem's subject entirely.
Questions
What is a simple example of a tricolon?
The classic is 'veni, vidi, vici', Caesar's three-verb report of a fast victory. Everyday examples include 'location, location, location' and 'blood, sweat and tears'. Any three parallel words, phrases or clauses in a row qualify, especially when they share a grammatical shape.
Is a tricolon the same as the rule of three?
They overlap but are not identical. The rule of three is a broad storytelling principle, covering three-act structures, three wishes and three little pigs. A tricolon is the sentence-level version: a specific rhetorical figure of three parallel units inside a passage of prose or verse.
Can a tricolon have more or fewer than three parts?
No; the number is in the name, from the Greek for 'three limbs'. A two-part parallel is a bicolon and a four-part one is a tetracolon. Interestingly, audiences often misremember tetracolons as tricolons, which suggests the three-part shape is the one our ears prefer.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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