At the end of a three-line stanza, two lines seem to have found their rhyme while the middle one is still waiting. The next stanza answers it—and introduces another sound that needs an answer. That continuing connection is a useful way to hear terza rima.
The Academy of American Poets describes the form through its interlocking tercets and its association with Dante’s Commedia. A tercet is a group of three lines. In terza rima, the pattern continues ABA BCB CDC: the middle rhyme of one group becomes the outside rhyme of the next.
Track sounds before making a judgement
Try a small invented set of line endings rather than a whole poem: day / light / away, followed by night / shore / bright, then door / rain / more. These are only practice words showing the rhyme chain, not an extract from a published poem or a finished example of metre.
Notice what crosses each boundary. The first group introduces the “light” sound, which returns as “night” and “bright” in the second. “Shore” then passes a different sound into the third group. The rhymes connect neighbouring stanzas without requiring the same complete line to be repeated.
Bring the sentence back into the reading
Once the sound pattern is clear, read a real passage for its grammar. Does a sentence stop at a stanza boundary or travel across it? Does the next tercet answer a question, change the image or continue an action? The rhyme gives a connection, but the sentence determines what is being said.
Do not pause mechanically after every line simply to display the scheme. Read the passage more than once and listen for the relation between the recurring sounds and the movement of the thought. Your spoken version remains an interpretation that should fit the actual words.
If you are reading a translation, check the translator’s note before expecting the original rhyme pattern to survive unchanged. A useful reading note might identify one stanza boundary where sound carries an expectation forward. That observation says more about your encounter with the poem than merely writing “ABA BCB CDC” beside the title.