Alliteration
The repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words.
Annotation
A note that is made when reading any text. In our case we will annotate or make lots of notes when we read poems.
Ballad
A lively, often funny poem that tells a story and is written in ballad stanzas. A ballad stanza is often (but not always) in the following form: alternating three and four beat lines, with the second rhyming with the fourth (ABCB)
Connotation
The implied or suggested meaning connected with a word.
Denotation
The dictionary meaning of a word.
Imagery
Words or a series of words representing a sensory experience: see/hear, smell, touch/taste.
Metaphor
Comparison between essentially unlike things without using like or as.
Meter
The measured pattern of rhythmic accents/stresses in a line of verse.
Onomatopoeia
The use of words to imitate the sounds of words they describe.
Personification
The endowment of inanimate objects or abstract concepts with animate or living qualities
Prose
The ordinary form of spoken or written language, without metrical structure, as distinguished from poetry or verse.
Quatrain
Four line stanza or grouping of four lines of verse
Refrain
A phrase or verse recurring at intervals in a song or poem, especially at the end of each stanza; chorus.
Rhyme Scheme
The pattern that end sounds make in a poem.
Rhythm
The arrangement of words into a more or less regular sequence of stressed and unstressed or long and short syllables
Scanning
Describing the rhythms of poetry by dividing the lines into feet, marking the locations of stressed and unstressed syllables, and counting the syllables.
Simile
A comparison between two unlike things using “like” or “as”
Stanza
A unit of poetic lines or a “paragraph” in poetry
Symbol/Symbolism
An object or action that stands for something beyond itself.
Verse
Writing arranged with a metrical rhythm, typically having a rhyme