Unit 9: Poetry Terms
Topics/Questions:
What is poetry? Reading of a Poem, Denotation and Connotation, Imagery, Simile, Metaphor, Personification, Apostrophe, Metonymy, Symbol, Allegory, Paradox, Overstatement, Understatement, Irony, Allusion, Meaning and Idea, Tone, Musical Devices, Rhythm and Meter, Sound and Meaning, Pattern, Evaluating poetry.
Terminology:
· Alliteration: The repetition of the same or similar sounds at the beginning of words.
Example: The teacher tried to tackle the task
· Allusion: An implied or indirect reference to something assumed to be known, such as a historical event or personage, a well-known quotation from literature, or a famous work of art
Example: see page 134 for poem
· Anaphora: The repetition of the same word or expression at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or lines for rhetorical or poetic effect
Example: “The clothes to mend/ the floor to mop/ the food to shop”
· Apostrophe: A figure of speech in which an address is made to an absent or deceased person or a personified thing rhetorically
Example: ‘“Come hither, son.” I heard death say’
· Assonance: The relatively close juxtaposition of the same or similar vowel sounds, but with different end consonants in a line or passage, thus a vowel rhyme, as in the words, date and fade.
Example: “time out of mind”; “free and easy”
· Aubade: A poem about dawn; a morning love song; or a poem about the parting of lovers at dawn
Example: see page 372 for poem
· Ballad: A fairly short narrative poem written in a song like stanza form Example: see “Edward” on page 246
· Blank Verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter
Example: see “Birches” by Robert Frost on page 350
· Caesura: A speech pause occurring within a line
Example: see page 188 for poem
· Couplet: Two successive lines, usually in the same meter, linked by rhyme
Example: “Do not go gentle into that good night/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light”
· Denotation: The basic definition or dictionary meaning of a word
Example: see page 41 for further explanation
· Didactic Poetry: Poetry having as a primary purpose to teach or preach
Example: “Early to bed and early to rise/ makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”
· Foot: The basic unit used in the scansion of measurement of metrical verse. A foot usually contains one accented syllable and one of two unaccented syllables
Example: see page 190 for poem
· Free Verse: Non-metrical poetry in which the basic rhythmic unit is the line in which pauses, line breaks, and formal patterns develop
Example: see page 189 for poem
· Hyperbole: A figure of speech in which exaggeration is used in the service of truth.
Example: “I’ll die if I have to take this test”
· Iambic Meter: A meter in which the majority of feet are iambs. The most common English meter.
Example: see page 191 for examples and further explanation
Example: “And the yellow half-man large and low”
· Internal Rhyme: A rhyme in which one or both of the rhyme words occur within a line.
Example: “He put the socks in the box”
Example: see poem on page 235
· Limerick: A fixed form consisting of five lines of anapestic meter, the first two trimeter, the next two dimeter, the last line trimeter, rhyming aabba; used exclusively for humorous or nonsense verse.
Example: A flea and a fly in a flue
Were caught, so what could they do?
Said the fly, “Let us flee.”
“Let us fly,” said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue
· Masculine Rhyme: A rhyme in which the repeated accented vowel sound is the final syllable of the words involved
Example: “dance-pants”
· Metaphor: A figure of speech in which an implicit comparison is made between two things, essentially unlike
Example: “paint the meadows with delight”
· Metonymy: A figure of speech in which some significant aspect or detail of an experience is used to represent the whole experience.
Example: In Robert Frost’s “Out, Out-” he describes the injured boy holding up his hand; “as if to keep/ the life from spilling”
· Octave: An eight line stanza; the first eight lines of a sonnet.
Example: see page 235 for poem
· Onomatopoeia: The use of words that mimic their meaning in their sound
Example: boom, click, plop
· Oxymoron: A compact paradox in which two successive words seemingly contradict each other
Example: “Jumbo shrimp”; “freezer burn”
· Paradox: A statement or situation containing apparently contradictory or incompatible elements
Example: “much madness is divine’s sense”
· Pentameter: A metrical line containing five feet
Example: “The woods
decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.”
· Personification: A figure of speech in which human attributes are given to an animal, an object, or a concept.
Example: “Two sunflowers/ move in the yellow room”
· Quatrain: (1) A four-line stanza. (2) A four-line division of a sonnet marked off by its rhyme scheme.
Example: “Evening red and morning gray
Set the traveler on his way
But evening gray and morning red
Bring the rain upon his head”
· Refrain: A repeated word, phrase, line, or group of lines, normally at some fixed position in a poem written in stanzaic form.
Example: WHEN daisies pied, and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men, for thus sings he:
'Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!' O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear.
When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,
And merry larks are ploughmen's clocks,
When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws,
And maidens bleach their summer smocks,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men, for thus sings he:
'Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!' O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear.
· Sestet: (1) A six-line stanza. (2) The last six lines of a sonnet structured on the Italian model.
Example: “And summer
evenings he would whirl around
Faster and faster till the drunken ground
Rose up to meet him; sometimes he would squat
Among the bent weeds of the vacant lot,
Waiting for dusk and someone dear to come
And whip him down the street, but gently home.”
· Simile: A figure of speech in which an explicit comparison is made between two things essentially unlike. The comparison is made explicit by the use of some such word or phrase as like or as.
Example: You are like a hurricane: there's calm in your eye, but I'm getting blown away —Neil Young
· Stanza: a group of lines whose metrical pattern (and usually its rhyme scheme as well) is repeated throughout a poem.
Example: Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridall of the earth and skie:
The dew shall weep thy fall to night;
For thou must die.
Sweet rose, whose hue angrie and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye:
Thy root is ever in its grave
And thou must die.
Sweet spring, full of sweet dayes and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie;
My musick shows ye have your closes,1
And all must die.
Onely a sweet and vertuous soul,
Like season’d timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.
· Synecdoche: A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole.
· 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.