Poetry Terms (IB English HL)
Terms
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- Allusion
- a reference to a historical, mythic, or literary person, place, event, movement, etc.; Notice Neptune, though, Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
- Stanza
- a group of verses separated from other such groups in a poem and often sharing a common rhyme scheme; Do not go gentle into that good night,/Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/Rage, rage against the dying of the light
- Quatrain
- four-line stanza, rhyming; abac or abcb (unbounded, or ballad), as in "Sir Patrick Spence"
- Rhythm
- an audible metrical pattern inside verse boundaries established by the pause; By the shore of Gitchie Gumee,/By the shining Big-Sea-Water,/At the doorway of his wigwam,/In the pleasant Summer morning,/Hiawatha stood and waited./
- Periphrasis
- using a wordy phrase to describe something for which one term exists; "death's other self" for "sleep"
- Metaphor
- a comparison that is made literally, either by a verb (for example, John Keats' "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" from his "Ode on a Grecian Urn")
- Free Verse
- rhythmical but non-metrical, non-rhyming lines
- Allegory
- a symbolical narrative; The Faerie Queene
- Ballad
- a popular song, often recited aloud, narrating a story, and passed down orally; La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats
- Rhyme
- normally end-rhyme, that is, lines of verse characterized by the consonance of terminal words or syllables; Silent, silent Night;Quench the holy light/Of thy torches bright.
- Onomatopoeia
- an instance where the sound of a word directly imitates its meaning (for example, "choo-choo," "hiss"
- Petrarchan poem
- A 14-line poem patterned on forms popularized by Petrarch. John Milton's "On the New Forces of Conscience under the Long Parliament."
- Tone
- the poet's attitude to the poem's subject as the reader interprets that, sometimes through the tone of the persona or speaker
- Blank verse
- unrhyming iambic pentameter, also called heroic verse, a ten-syllable line and the usual rhythm of English dramatic and epic poetry; Paradise Lost by Milton
- Personification
- an anthropomorphic figure of speech where the poet describes an abstraction, a thing, or a non-human form as if it were a person. William Blake's "O Rose, thou art sick!"
- Lyric poem
- short poem in which the poet, the poet's persona, or a speaker expresses personal feelings, and often addressed to the reader (originally, a poem sung to a lyre).
- Cacophony
- harsh-sounding language; Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll/'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe/All mimsy were the borogoves,/And the mome raths outgrabe.
- Sestet
- a six-line stanza, or the final six lines of a 14-line Italian or Petrarchan sonnet./The Better Part/So asnwerest thou; but why not rather say/"Hath man no second life?—Pitch this one high!/Sits there no judge in heaven, our sin to see?/More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!/Was Christ a man like us? Ah! Let us try/If we then, too, can be such men as he!"
- Verse
- as a mass noun, poetry in general (but in a non-judgmental sense); and, as a regular noun, a line of poetry.
- Theme
- a prevailing idea in a work, but sometimes not explicitly stated, as in Ogden Nash's "Candy is dandy, / But liquor is quicker," which is about neither candy nor liquor.
- Alliteration
- using the same consonant to start two or more stressed words or syllables in a phrase or verse line, or using a series of vowels to begin such words or syllables in sequence; Tyger, Tyger burning bright;
- Accent
- a stressed syllable or ictus; "When shall we three meet again?"
- Terzain
- a stanza of three lines; Lewis Turco's Terzanelle in Thunderweather
- Assonance
- the rhyming of a word with another in one or more of their accented vowels, but not in their consonants; sometimes called vowel rhyme. To Autumn by John Keats the line : "Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;"
- Iamb
- metrical foot consisting of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. This is the rhythm of ordinary English speech. Examples of iambic words are "divide" and "deter." Gerard Manley Hopkins' "The Windhover" begins deceptively with a line that appears to have five iambic feet, "I caught this morning morning's minion, king-", but that scans differently in his own sprung rhythm.
- Couplet
- a pair of successive rhyming lines, usually of the same length, termed "closed" when they form a bounded grammatical unit like a sentence, and termed "heroic" in 17th- and 18th-century verse when serious in subject, five-foot iambic in form, and holding a complete thought; "Eenie Meenie Miny Moe,Catch a tiger by his toe."
- Sonnet
- in the Renaissance, a brief song or lyric of indeterminate rhyme scheme, but also a 14-line poem patterned on forms popularized by Petrarch; John Milton's "On the New Forces of Conscience under the Long Parliament."
- Elegy
- a Greek or Latin form in alternating dactylic hexameter and dactylic pentameter lines; and a melancholy poem lamenting its subject's death but ending in consolation. Examples in English include John Milton's "Lycidas,"
- Understatement
- Expressing an idea with less emphasis or in a lesser degree than is the actual case.; "He's no dummy."
- Foot
- the basic unit of measurement of accentual-syllabic metre, usually thought to contain one stressed syllable and at least one unstressed syllable. The standard types of feet in English are iambic, trochaic, dactylic, anapestic, spondaic, and pyrrhic. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Metrical Feet"
- Portmanteau
- Lewis Carroll's phrase for a neologism created by combining two existing words. His "Jabberwocky," for example, fuses "lithe" and a term like "slight" or "slimy" to produce "slithy" in the line "Twas brillig, and the slithy toves."
- Symbol
- something in the world of the senses, including an action, that manifests (reveals) or signifies (is a sign for or a pointer to) a thing, or what is abstract, otherworldly, or numinous; Any image or action termed a Jungian archetype is also symbolic in that it manifests something in the collective unconscious of human beings.
- Synecdoche
- a figure of speech where the part stands for the whole (for example, "I've got wheels" for "I have a car").
- Haiku
- Japanese poem of three unrhyming lines in 5, 7, and 5 syllables. For example, windshield wipers swish./and Monday fm blues say/melancholy grace
- Epic
- an extended narrative poem with a heroic or superhuman protagonist engaged in an action of great significance in a vast setting (often including the underworld and engaging the gods). Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene
- Caesura
- a stop or pause in a metrical line, often marked by punctuation or by a grammatical boundary, such as a phrase or clause; To be or not to be || that is the question
- Limerick
- a fixed verse form appearing first in The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women (1820), popularized by Edward Lear, and rhyming aabba, where a-lines have five feet and the b-lines three feet, and where the first and last lines end with the same word (a practice dropped in the 20th century). A _______ has been defined as "A comic poem consisting of one couplet of accentual Poulter's Measure with fixed (internal) rhyme : 3aa2bb3a" (Malof, 204). Lear fused the third and fourth lines into a single line with internal rhyme. See examples authored by such as Gelett Burgess and A. H. Reginald Buller.
- Oxymoron
- an expression impossible in fact but not necessarily self-contradictory, such as John Milton's description of hell as "darkness visible" in Book I of Paradise Lost.
- Epigram
- a quotation, taken from another literary work, that is placed at the start of a poem under the title. For example, T. S. Eliot's "Gerontion" begins with a quotation from Shakespeare's play Measure for Measure
- Octave
- an eight-line stanza or poem, of which there are several types; ababbcbc : Chaucer's stanzaic form in The Monk's Tale
- Tercet
- a rhyming triplet, found in sequences such as aaa bbb; Thomas Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain"
- Anapest
- a metrical foot consisting of two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one; I am out of humanity's reach./I must finish my journey alone. -William Cowper's "Verses Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk"
- Anadiplosis
- a repetition of the last word in a line or segment at the start of the next line,or segment; My conscience hath a thousand several tongues/And every tongue brings in a several tale, /And every tale condemns me for a villain.-Shakespeare, Richard III.
- Ghazal
- an Eastern verse form consisting of successive couplets whose lines all end with the same refrain phrase (the qafia), just before which is placed the couplet's rhyming word (radif). The last couplet includes the name of the poet. 2005, Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown, Vintage 2006, p. 100; A poet could explain him to himself but he was a soldier and had no place to go for ghazals or odes.
- Motif
- an image or action in a literary work that is shared by other works and that is sometimes thought to belong to a collective unconsciousness; "Nevermore" in Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven
- Hyperbole
- exaggeration beyond reasonable credence. An example is the close of John Donne's holy sonnet "Death, thou shalt die!"
- Trochee
- a metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by an unaccented syllable. William Blake opens "The Tyger" with a predominantly trochaic line : "Tyger! Tyger! burning bright."
- Euphony
- a pleasing harmony of sounds.
- Internal Rhyme
- normally end-rhyme, that is, lines of verse characterized by the consonance of terminal words or syllables. Rhymed words conventionally share all sounds following the word's last stressed syllable. Thus "tenacity" and "mendacity" rhyme, but not "jaundice" and "John does," or "tomboy" and "calm bay." The rhyme scheme is usually the pattern of end-rhymes in a stanza, each rhyme being encoded by a letter of the alphabet from a onwards.
- Enjambment
- the running over of a sentence or phrase from one verse to the next, without terminal punctuation, hence not end-stopped. Such verses can be called run-on lines.
- Metonymy
- figure of speech in which the poet substitutes a word normally associated with something for the term usually naming that thing; "big-sky country" for western Canada
- Apostrophe
- an address to a dead or absent person or personification as if he or she were present; Wordsworth's sonnet Milton which begins : "Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour."
- Spondee
- a metrical foot consisting of two accented syllables / ' ' /. An example of a spondaic word is "hog-wild." The di-spondee / ' ' ' ' / is a Classical Greek and Latin metrical foot.
- Idyll
- either a pastoral poem about shepherds or an epyllion, a brief epic that depicts a heroic episode. An example of the second is Alfred lord Tennyson's "Idylls of the King."
- Meter
- the rhythm of verse, reducible to one of four kinds, accentual, syllabic, accentual-syllabic, and quantitative. "That time of year thou mayst in me behold"
- Ode
- a poem of high seriousness with irregular stanzaic forms; The regular Pindaric or Greek ode imitates the passionate manner of Pindar (ca. 552-442 B.C.) and consists of a strophe, an antistrophe, and an epode.
- Simile
- a comparison made with "as," "like," or "than." "O My Luve's like a red, red rose."
- Rondeau
- a mainly octosyllabic poem consisting of between ten and fifteen lines, having only two rhymes and with the opening words used twice as an unrhyming refrain at the end of the second and third stanzas; Chaucer's "Now welcome, summer" at the close of The Parliament of Fowls
- Villanelle
- an Italian verse form consisting of five three-line stanzas (tercets) and a final quatrain, possessing only two rhymes, repeating the first and third lines of the first stanza alternately in the following stanzas, and combining those two refrain lines into the final couplet in the quatrain; W. E. Henley's "A Dainty Thing's the Villanelle,"
- Chiasmus
- repetition of any group of verse elements in reverse order; Samuel Johnson's "For we that live to please, must please to live."