AP English Warmup #1: Allusion and Symbol
Allusion – a reference to something in history, literature, or culture (usually from the past).
Many allusions come from the Bible and mythology.
“She hath Dian’s wit...” Romeo discussing the chastity of Rosaline by alluding to the Roman
goddess of chastity, Diana.
Symbol - Anything that stands for or represents something else beyond it—usually an idea
conventionally associated with it. Objects like flags and crosses can function symbolically.
In literary usage, a symbol is a specially evocative kind of image; a word or phrase referring to a
concrete object, scene, or action which also has some further significance associated with it. For
example, roses, mountains, birds, and voyages have all been used as common literary symbols.
The blossoming pear tree has symbolic meaning in Their Eyes Were Watching God.
AP English LiteratureWarmup #2: Alliteration
Alliteration is the repeating of beginning consonant sounds. Even little children love tongue twisters that use alliteration. Here is an example:
Sue sells seashells by the seashore.
Alliteration can be a great help to memory. It is alliteration that helps us remember certain phrases. For example, “live and learn,” “sink or swim,” “the more the merrier,” and “good as gold” all use alliteration.
AP English Warmup #3: Allegory
- A story with a second distinct meaning partially hidden beneath its literal meaning.
- The principal technique of allegory is personification, with abstract qualities given human shape.
- It may be seen as an extended, structured metaphor.
- In John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, each character embodies an idea within the pre-existing Puritan doctrine of salvation.
- Common in the Middle Ages (morality plays, Dante); more recent examples (Orwell) tend to be satiric and more political than religious.
AP English Warmup #4: Anachronism
- The misplacing of any person, thing, custom, or event outside its proper historical time.
- Performance of Shakespeare's plays in modern dress are deliberate anachronism.
- Clock in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (were no clocks in Caesar's time).
AP English Warmup #5: Anaphora
- A rhetorical figure of repetition in which the same word or phrase is repeated in (and usually at the beginning of) successive lines, clauses, or sentences.
- Found in both poetry and prose, it was used extensively by Dickens and Whitman (also M.L. King, Jr.)
- Example from Emily Dickinson
Mine—by the Right of the White Election!
Mine—by the Royal Seal!
Mine—by the Sign in the Scarlet prison
Bars—cannot conceal!
AP English Warmup #6: Antithesis
- A contrast or opposition, either rhetorical or philosophical.
- In Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), the characteristics of Adam and Eve are contrasted by antithesis:
For contemplation he and valour formed,
For softness she and sweet attractive grace;
He for God only, she for God in him.
- Cultivated especially by Pope and other 18th century poets.
- Also familiar in prose, as in John Ruskin's sentence, “Government and cooperation are in all things the laws of life; anarchy and competition the laws of death.”
AP English Warmup #7: Apophthegm (Apothegm)
- An aphorism or maxim (a statement of some general principle, expressed memorably by condensing much wisdom into few words), especially one of the pithiest kind.
- Boswell refers to Johnson's famous saying, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” as an apophthegm.
AP English Warmup #8: Apostrophe
- A rhetorical figure in which the speaker addresses a dead or absent person, or an abstraction or inanimate object.
- Apostrophes are found frequently among the speeches of Shakespeare's characters. In Richard III, Elizabeth addresses the Tower of London:
Pity, you ancient stone, those tender babes
Whom envy hath immured within your walls.
- Apostrophe is a convention of the ode and the elegy, and the poet's invocation of a muse in epic poetry (as in Homer's Odyssey), is a special form of apostrophe.
AP English Warmup #9: Archetype
- A symbol, theme, setting, or character-type that recurs so frequently or prominently as to suggest that it embodies some essential element of 'universal' human experience.
- Symbols such as the rose, the serpent, and the sun
- Themes revolving around love, death, and conflict
- Settings like the paradisal garden
- Stock characters like the femme fatale, the hero, or the magician
AP English Warmup #10: aside
1. A short speech or remark spoken by a character in a drama, directed either to the audience or to another character, which by convention is supposed to be inaudible to the other characters on stage.
2. In Romeo and Juliet, when Samson and Gregory are trying to start a fight, Samson says to Gregory, “Is the law of our side if I say 'aye'?” and Gregory replies, “Nay,”this is not meant to be heard by the Montague servants they are starting trouble with.
AP English Warmup #11: Assonance
- The repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds in the stressed syllables (and sometimes in the following unstressed syllables) of neighboring words.
- It is distinct from rhyme in that the consonants differ although the vowels match: sweet dreams, hit or miss.
- Tennyson's “The Lotos-Eaters”:
And round about the keel with faces pale,
Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,
The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.
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AP English Warmup #12: Asyndeton
- A form of verbal compression which consists of the omission of connecting words (usually conjunctions) between clauses. The most common form is the omisson of “and,” leaving only a sequence of phrases linked by commas.
- From Conrad's “Heart of Darkness”: “An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was thick, warm, heavy, sluggish.”
The most famous example is Julius Caesar's boast, “Veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”)
AP English Warmup #13: Aubade
- A song or lyric poem lamenting the arrival of dawn to separate two lovers.
- Act III, scene v of Romeo and Juliet is an aubade, when the day breaks after their wedding night together and Romeo must escape to Mantua.
AP English Literature Warmup #14: ballad
A folk song or orally transmitted poem telling in a direct and dramatic manner some popular story usually derived from a tragic incident in local history or legend.
Normally composed in quatrains (4 line stanzas) with alternating four-stress and three-stress lines, the second and fourth lines rhyming (ballad metre).
AP English Literature Warmup #15: bathos
A lapse into the ridiculous by a poet aiming at elevated expression. Whereas anticlimax can be a deliberate poetic effect, bathos is an unintended failure. Named by A. Pope.
from Dryden's Annus Mirabilis:
The Eternal heard, and from the heavenly quire
Chose out the Cherub with the flaming sword
And had him swiftly drive the approaching fire
From where our naval magazines were stored.
Wordsworth, Whitman, and other poets who seek to dignify humble subjects are especially likely to create bathos.
AP English Literature Warmup #16: blank verse
Unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter, as in the final lines of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’:
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Much of Shakespeare and Milton is written in blank verse.
An iamb is a poetic foot consisting of two syllables with the stress on the second syllable. Pentameter means that there are five poetic feet in the line (“penta” means “five,” right?)
But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the East, and Juliet is the Sun. (from Romeo and Juliet, of course)
AP English Literature Warmup #17: Metaphor
The most important or widespread figure of speech, in which one thing, idea, or action is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting another thing, idea, or action, so as to suggest some common quality shared by the two.
In metaphor, this resemblance is assumed as an imaginary identity rather than directly stated as a comparison: referring to a man as that snake, or saying he is a snake is metaphorical, whereas he is like a snake is a simile.
Much of our everyday language is made up of metaphorical words and phrases that pass unnoticed as 'dead' metaphors, like the branch of an organization.
A mixed metaphor is one in which the combination of qualities suggested is illogical or ridiculous, usually as a result of trying to apply two metaphors to one thing: those vipers stabbed us in the back.
AP English Literature Warmup #18: simile
An explicit comparison between two different things, actions, or feelings, using the words 'as' or 'like' as in Wordsworth's line:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
A very common figure of speech in both prose and verse, simile is more tentative and decorative than metaphor.
An epic simile is a lengthy and more elaborate kind of simile used as a digression in a narrative work.
AP English Literature Warmup #19: Personification
A figure of speech by which animals, abstract ideas, or inanimate things are
referred to as if they were human, as in Sir Philip Sidney’s line:
Invention, Nature’s child, fled stepdame Study’s blows
Personification is common in most ages of poetry, and particularly in the 18th
century. It has a special function as the basis of allegory. In drama, the term is
sometimes applied to the impersonation of non-human things and ideas by
human actors.
AP English Literature Warmup #20: Imagery
Those uses of language in a literary work that evoke sense-impressions by literal or figurative reference to perceptible or concrete objects , scenes, actions, or states.
The imagery of a literary work comprises the set of images that it uses; these need not be mental “pictures”, but may appeal to senses other than sight.
The following lines are all from “Meeting at Night” by Robert Browning:
“...And the yellow half-moon large and low;...”
“...Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach...”
“...And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears...”
AP English Literature Warmup #21: Verbal Irony
A discrepancy between what is said and what is really meant. In its crudest form, it is sarcasm.
All sarcasm is verbal irony, but not all verbal irony is sarcasm.
In “Hunters in the Snow,” when Kenny says to Tub, “You're just wasting away before my very eyes,” he is speaking ironically and sarcastically because Tub is obese.
AP English Literature Warmup #22: Dramatic Irony
The audience knows more about a character's situation than the character does, foreseeing an outcome contrary to the character's expectations, and thus ascribing a sharply different sense to some of the character's own statements.
In Romeo and Juliet, when Romeo sees Juliet in the tomb and says that she is still beautiful and does not seem dead, the audience knows that she isn't. Romeo does not know this and kills himself to be with her.
AP English Literature Warmup #24: Tone
The writer's or speaker's attitude toward the subject, the audience, or herself or himself; the emotional coloring, or emotional meaning, of a work.
In Robert Frost's poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the speaker is sensitive enough to stop and watch the snow fall, and the poet is sympathetic to the speaker. Beauty is a human value that should be part of life, but if one is devoted to it to the point of missing other obligations and duties, one fails as a responsible being. The poet accepts the speaker's choice with regret.
Tone frequently shifts, especially in a poem or a short prose piece.
AP English Literature Warmup #25: Motif
A situation, incident, idea, image, or character-type that is found in many different literary works, folktales, or myths.
Any element of a work that is elaborated into a more general theme.
Examples: The fever that purges away a character’s false identity in Victorian literature, or the carpe diem motif in European lyric poetry.
Where an image, incident, or other element is repeated significantly within a single work, it is more commonly referred to as a leitmotif.
AP English Literature Warmup #26: Metonymy
A figure of speech that replaces the name of one thing with the name of something else closely associated with it.
Examples: the bottle for alcoholic drink, the press for journalism, the Oval Office for the U.S. presidency.
A well-known metonymic saying is “The pen is mightier than the sword,” meaning that writing is more powerful than warfare.
AP English Literature Warmup #29: Caesura
A pause in a line of verse, often coinciding with a break between clauses or sentences. It is usually placed in the middle of the line, but it may appear near the beginning or towards the end.
If it follows a stressed syllable, it is known as a “masculine” caesura, while if it follows an unstressed syllable, it is “feminine.”
From Walt Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider:”
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
AP English Literature Warmup #32: Rhyme
The identity (similarity) of sound between syllables or paired groups of syllables, usually at the ends of verse (poetry) lines.
Normally the last stressed syllable in the line and all sounds following it make up the rhyming element: this may be a monosyllable (love/above – known as “masculine rhyme”) or two syllables (whether/together – known as feminine rhyme), or even three syllables (glamorous/amorous – known as triple rhyme). The rhyming pairs here are all examples of “full rhyme,” “perfect rhyme,” or “true rhyme.”
In slant rhyme, the vowel sounds do not match even though the consonants do. Slant rhyme is also known as “near rhyme,” “approximate rhyme,” “imperfect rhyme,” or “half rhyme.”
In eye rhyme, the spellings of the rhyming elements match, but the sounds do not (love/prove).
AP English Literature Warmup #33: Rhyme Royal
A stanza form consisting of seven lines of iambic pentameter rhyming ababbcc, first used by Chaucer and thus known as the Chaucerian stanza. It was an important form of English verse in the 15th and 16th centuries, but has rarly been used since.
From the besieged Ardea all in post,
Borne by the trustless wings of false desire,
Lust-breathed Tarquin leaves the Roman host,
And to Collatium bears the lightless fire
Which, in pale embers hid, lurks to aspire,
And girdle with embracing flames the waist
Of Collatine's fair love, Lucrece the chaste.
From Shakespeare's “The Rape of Lucrece”
AP English Literature Warmup #34: Chiasmus
A figure of speech by which the order of the terms in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second. This may involve a repetition of the same words (“Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure” - Byron), or just a reversed parallel between two corresponding pairs of ideas, as in this line from Mary Leapor's “Essay on Woman” from 1751:
Despised, if ugly; if she's fair, betrayed.
The figure is especially common in 18th century English poetry, but is also found in prose of all
periods.
AP English Literature Warmup #40: Litotes
A figure of speech by which an affirmation is made indirectly by denying its opposite, usually with an effect of understatement. This device is not uncommon in all kinds of writing. For example, William Wordsworth in his autobiographical poem The Prelude (1850) frequently uses the phrase “not seldom” to mean “fairly often.”
AP English Literature Warmup #41: Hyperbole
Exaggeration for the sake of emphasis in a figure of speech not meant literally. An everyday example is the
complaint, “I have been waiting here for ages.” Hyperbolic expressions are common in the inflated style of
dramatic speech known as bombast, as in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra when Cleopatra praises the
dead Antony:
His leg bestrid the ocean: his reared arm
Crested the world.
AP English Literature Warmup #42: Understatement
A form of irony in which a point is deliberately expressed as less in magnitude, value, or importance, than it
actually is. For example, in Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio dismisses the fatal wound he has just received as “ a scratch.” He elaborates on the figure with a second understatement: “Marry, 'tis enough.”The effect is to create a sort of double take, with the force of the implied meaning—here, that Mercutio is well aware that he has suffered a death blow—intensified by the restraint with which it is expressed.
AP English Literature Warmup #49: deus ex machina
Used by ancient Greeks and Shakespeare to solve the plot problems quickly, the term
is now used pejoratively (negatively) for an improbable or unexpected contrivance by which
an author resolves the problems of the plot in a play or novel, and which has not been
convincingly prepared for in the preceding action. For example, the discovery of a lost will
was a favorite resort of Victorian novelists.
AP English Literature Warmup #50: diction
The choice of words used in a literary work. A writer's diction may be described according to the oppositions formal/colloquial, abstract/concrete, and literal figurative.
Poetic diction refers to that specialized language which is peculiar to poetry in that it employs words and figures not normally found in common speech or prose. This includes elided forms such as o'er, yon, etc.
AP English Literature Warmup #51: dirge and elegy
dirge – a song of lamentation in mourning for someone's death or a poem in the form of such a song, and usually less elaborate than an elegy.
elegy – an elaborately formal lyric poem lamenting the death of a friend or public figure, or reflecting seriously on a solemn subject.
AP English Literature Warmup #52: pastoral and idyll
pastoral – a highly conventional mode of writing that celebrates the innocent life of shepherds and shepherdesses in poems, plays, and prose romances. Pastoral literature describes the loves and sorrows of musical shepherds, usually in an idealized Golden Age of rustic innocence and idleness.
idyll – a short poem describing an incident of country life in terms of idealized innocence and contentment, or any such episode in a poem or prose work. The term is synonymous with “pastoral.”