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POETRY
Glossary
Alliteration
the repetition of sounds in a sequence of associated words used for onomatopoetic or emphatic
effects. ("the furrow followed free" or "artificial aids")
Ambiguity
a word or phrase with two or multiple different meanings ("ship sails today")
Anacrusis
(striking up) an additional syllable at the beginning of a verse before the normal rhythm
Anaphora
the repetition of the same word or phrase in two or more successive clauses. ("Awake, my
spirits/awake my glory ...")
Antithesis
the
opposing
of
ideas
by
parallelism
("There is no king who has not had a
and no slave who has not had a king among his")
Apostrophe
an explicit address to an imaginary, dead, or absent person, or to a place, thing, or personified
abstraction either to begin a poem or to make a dramatic break in thought somewhere within
the poem.
Ballad Stanza
a simple spirited poem in short stanzas which tells some popular story in verse. The standard
ballad verse form is a quatrain, mostly with only one rhyming pair (abcb) and iambic metre.
Ballade
a poem divided into stanzas of equal length, usually of seven or eight lines.
Caesura
a pause within a line of poetry, often resulting from the natural rhythm of language and not
necessarily indicated by punctuation. A caesura usually occurs near the middle of the line.
Chiasm
a figure of speech by which the order of words in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in
the
second.
("he saved others; himself he cannot save")
Cliché
a stereotype expression
in
slave
grammatical
among his
structure
ancestors,
poetry in which the visual arrangement of words or letters suggests something about the
subject of the poem
Concrete Poetry
("
shr
ink
")
Consonance
the close repetition of identical consonant sounds before and after differing vowel sounds:
leave/love, short/shirt. Consonance is used to create emphasis and unity.
Elegy
"the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind" (Coleridge), now mostly a song of
lamentation for the dead
End Rhyme
rhyme at the ends of lines of verse, distinguished from rhyme within a line (internal rhyme)
and rhyme at the beginning of a line (initial rhyme)
Epic
a poem that celebrates in the form of a continuous narration the achievements of one or more
heroic personages of the past.
Ellipsis
the omission of a word or words necessary to complete the grammatical structure of a
sentence ("No life left")
Epigram
a short poem ending in a witty or ingenious turn of thought
Euphemism
the substitution of a less distasteful word or phrase for a more offensive one ("to pass away"
for "to die")
Eye Rhyme
rhyme based on spelling rather than sound; for example, bough and though, have and grave.
Eye rhyme may be the result of a change in pronunciation since the time the poem was
written.
the basic unit of rhythmic measurement in a line of poetry. The number and type of feet in a
line of a poem determine ist meter. The five most commonly used feet are illustrated below.
iamb: one unaccented syllable followed by one accented syllable ("today/reply" etc.)
Foot
trochee: one accented syllable followed by one unaccented syllable ("nonsense/final")
anapaest: two unaccented syllables followed by one accented syllable ("understand")
dactyl: one accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables ("sympathy")
spondee: two accented syllables ("Don't move")
Free Verse
poetry without regular metrical pattern or rhyme-scheme
Heroic Couplet
English heroic verse, iambic pentameters, rhyming in pairs (aa bb cc ...)
Heroic Verse
verse used in epic poetry; in English, the iambic of five feet
Internal Rhyme
the rhyming of two or more words in the same line, most often in the middle and at the end of
the line; also called middle rhyme and leonine rhyme.
"I am the daughter of Earth and Water"
Irony
a figure of speech in which one's meaning is expressed by language of an opposite tendency
Limerick
a type of nonsense verse with a definite pattern: a five-line stanza rhyming aabba in which
lines one, two, and five have three anapaestic feet and lines three and four have two anapaestic
feet:
"There was a young lady of Wilts,
a
Who walked up to Scotland on stilts;
a
When they said it was shocking
b
To show so much stocking,
b
She answered, 'Then what about kilts?'"
a
Lyric
a short poem, of a musical and rhythmical nature, expressing directly the "speaker's" own
feelings.
Metaphor
the transfer of a name or descriptive term to a different but analogous object ("Life is but a
voyage")
Meter
any specific form of verse, determined by the number of the feet it contains, e.g.
monometer (one foot), dimeter (two feet), trimeter (three feet), tetrameter (four feet),
pentameter (five feet), hexameter (six feet), heptameter (seven feet), octameter (eight feet)
Motif
a recurring idea, image or literary device, emphasizing some element of the theme of the poem
Onomatopoeia
use of words whose sound imitates the sound of the thing being named.
Oxymoron
an expression uniting two contradictory terms to give it point ("O heavy lightness ... Feather
of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health")
Paradox
statement that seems to be opposite to common sense, but nevertheless may contain a truth.
("More haste, less speed")
Parallelism
structural arrangement of clauses or larger passages in which elements of equal importance are
equally phrased.
Parataxis
the use of simple, restrictive syntactical patterns (simple clauses, enumeration, ...)
Parody
a form of literary composition in which a serious original work is criticized or even ridiculed
by imitation and exaggeration
Personification
a figure of speech in which sth. inanimate is referred to as if it were a human being ("Justice is
blind")
Refrain
lines of a song or lyric which are repeated at the end of each stanza
Rhyme
the identity of sound between two words from the last stressed syllable on. Male end-rhymes
have a final accented syllable (got/shot), while in female end-rhymes the last syllable is
unaccented flower/power). Beside the perfect rhyme there are less strict patterns as the eyerhyme (dies/calamities) and other imperfect rhymes (assonance, consonance, nasal rhyme etc.)
Rhythm
the measured flow of words achieved by the particular arrangement of accented and
unaccented syllables
Run-On Line
(enjambment) the carrying on of the grammatical construction from one line into the next:
"This
City
now
doth,
like
a
garment,
wear
The beauty of the morning."
Scansion
analyzing the meter in lines of poetry by counting and marking the accented and unaccented
syllables, dividing the lines into metrical feet, and showing the major pauses, if any, in the
line.
Simile
an imaginative comparison of two objects, scenes or actions for explanatory, illustrative, or
merely ornamental purpose (grammatically indicated by "like" or "as")
Stanza
a group of lines into which verse is divided. Stanzas may be of all types in length (couplet,
tercet, quatrain ...) and metrical form.
Symbol
a sign that represents an idea
Typographical
Devices
deliberate peculiarities in the printing of a poem
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