Poetry Terms in a Page
Alliteration—The repetition of beginning sounds of words in close proximity. Good, you got goobers.
Anaphora—The repetition of a word or words at the beginning of successive lines, clauses, or sentences.
Blackness
is a title,
is a preoccupation,
is a commitment… --Gwendolyn Brooks, “A Primer for Blacks”
Apostrophe—The direct address of a dead or absent person or an inanimate object. Oh, moon, why do you torment lovers so?
Assonance—The repetition of vowel sounds within words in close proximity. He is sick of bitter figs.
Blank Verse (See Meter)—Blank verse is verse written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. In other words, each line is comprised of ten syllables, divided into five units (called feet) of two syllables each, with the first syllable being unstressed and the second syllable being stressed. Blank verse is the most popular form of English verse because it most closely approximates the rhythms of everyday speech. Below is an example of blank verse in Robert Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man.” Notice, two feet have substitutions, or feet that are something besides perfect iambs.
She ran/ on tip/toe down/ the dark/ened passage
To meet/ him in/ the door/way with/ the news
And put/ him on/ his guard./ “Silas/ is back.”
Caesura—A pause or break in a line of poetry. If we must die, let it not be like hogs.—Claude McKay “If We Must Die”
Conceit—An elaborate, extended metaphor sustained over several lines.
Consonance—Repetition of consonant sounds within words in close proximity.
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door.—Edgar Allen Poe, “The Raven” Besides the t’s the r’s are also examples of consonance.
Couplet—Two lines of successive rhyming verse. I love some softly spoken verse/ even more than a brand, new purse.
Free Verse—Poetry that does not have regular patterns of rhyme or meter.
Lyric Poetry—Poetry that is primarily concerned with evoking emotions rather than telling a story
Meter—A poem’s rhythm; the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that create this rhythm. A poem’s meter is identified by recognizing the pattern of syllabic stresses and placing them into discrete units called feet. The four feet we care about—as much as we can care about these things— are iambs (unstressed, stressed), trochees (stressed, unstressed), dactyls (stressed, unstressed, unstressed), and anapests (unstressed, unstressed, stressed)
Once you’ve recognized the syllabic pattern and divided up the feet, all you have to do is count the number of feet to get the poem’s meter. The first part of the meter is determined by the type of foot (iambic, trochaic, dactylic, anapestic) and the second part, by the number of feet (monometer, dimeter, trimester, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, heptameter, etc.)
Here are some examples:
Anapestic Tetrameter (four anapests)
Twas the night/ before Christ/mas and all/ through the house
Dactylic Dimeter (two dactyls)
Theirs not to/ make reply
Theirs not to/reason why
Theirs but to/do and die
Trochaic Tetrameter (four trochees) Iambic Trimeter (three iambs)
Peter/, Peter,/ pumpkin/-eater Nature’s/ first green/ is gold
Had a/ wife and/ couldn’t/ keep her Her hard/est hue/ to hold
Mimesis—A term that has several meanings, but the only one we are concerned with is the imitative quality in language, when poetic language mimics either the sound (see onomatopoeia) or rhythm of the thing it represents.
Narrative Poetry—Poetry primarily interested in telling a story, using such elements as plot, setting, and character to develop theme.
Ode—A lyric poem written in elevated language that praises or celebrates something. Typically an Ode is titled “Ode to ___” or simply, “To____.”
Onomatopoeia—A form of mimesis in which a word that sounds like the thing to which it refers. Slap, gargle, plop, murmer, whisper, and growl are examples of onomatopoeia.
Parallelism—The use of similar grammatical constructions to convey ideas of equal importance. Though not strictly a poetic convention, parallelism often plays an important role in poetry, contributing to a poem’s meter, syntax, and overall effectiveness
Make no parley—stop for no postulations
Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper
or prayer,
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man.
--Walt Whitman, “Beat! Drums! Beat”
Rhyme—The occurrence of similar sounds at the end of two or more words.
End Rhyme—Rhyme at the end of lines. End rhyme typically has a fixed pattern called a rhyme scheme. A poem’s rhyme scheme is determined by assigning letters—in alphabetic order—to rhyming words. Words that rhyme get the same letter and each time a new rhyme is introduced so is a new letter.
I went to the state fair (a)
To attend my blind date. (b)
She had not any hair. (a)
So, so sad was my fate. (b)
But it would have been kind (c)
if I had truly been blind. (c) The rhyme scheme for this little gem is ababcc.
Slant / Approximate/Off Rhyme—Rhyme that isn’t quite exact, typically with either a vowel, but occasionally a consonant sound being different. Slant rhyme creates a wonderful tension between melody and dissonance, pleasantry and sharpness. It’s like music that has a little feedback and distortion. Emily Dickinson is the unparalleled master of slant rhyme. Here are a couple beauties from her poem, “A Never Saw a Moor.”
I never spoke with God, (a)
Nor visited in heaven; (b)
Yet certain am I of the spot (a)
As if the chart were given. (b)
Internal Rhyme Rhyme that occurs within the line itself.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary
--Edgar Allen Poe, “The Raven”
Stanza—a group of lines that form a unit in a poem. A stanza is usually characterized by a common pattern of meter, rhyme, and number of lines. A stanza in poetry is kind of like a paragraph in prose.
Sonnet—Perhaps the most famous and most popular forms of poetry, the sonnet is fourteen line lyrical poem written in iambic pentameter. Sonnets were especially all the rage in Elizabethan times, with William Shakespeare writing 154 of them all by himself. There are different variations of the sonnet with the most popular being the Shakespearean, the Petrarchan, and the Spenserian.
Verse—Another word for poetry (Any writing that is not in prose)