AP Lit Words #2 Examples

Euphony

"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" (John Keats)

Foot

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" (general term for a unit of meter)

Foot iambic (iamb)

"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day" (Thomas Gray)

Foot trochaic (trochee)

"Tyger Tyger, burning bright" (William Blake)

Foot dactylic (dactyl)

"Half a league, half a league" (Alfred Lord Tennyson)

Foot anapestic (anapest)

"And the sound of a voice that is still" (Edna St. Vincent Millay)

Form

Sonnets, haikus, and free verse are examples of different poetic forms

Free verse

Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass contains free verse poems

Hyperbole

"I'm so hungry I could eat a horse"

Iambic pentameter

"But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?" (Shakespeare)

Image (Imagery)

"The golden yellow sunlight filtered down through the pale leaves"

Lyric

Emily Dickinson's "I’m Nobody! Who are you?" is a lyric poem

Metaphor

"Time is a thief"

Meter

The steady rhythm in Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

Metonymy

"The pen is mightier than the sword" (pen representing writing, sword representing force)

Narrative poem

Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven tells a story of loss and despair

Octave

The first eight lines of a Petrarchan sonnet

Ode

Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" expresses admiration for the nightingale

Onomatopoeia

"The bees buzzed in the garden"

Oxymoron

"Jumbo shrimp"

Paradox

"Less is more"

Parody

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes includes parodies of chivalric romance novels