Poetry Terms: English 10 Honors

Anaphora

The repetition of a word or phrase, usually at the beginning of a line. Example: "Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina…" (Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream).

Allusion

A brief, intentional reference to a historical, mythic, or literary person, place, event, or movement. Example: Seamus Heaney's "Singing School" title alludes to W.B. Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium."

Alliteration

The repetition of initial stressed, consonant sounds in a series of words within a phrase or verse line. Example: "With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim" (Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty).

Antithesis

Pitting competing impulses against each other, or contrasting ideas in a balanced structure. Example: Love "builds a Heaven in Hell's despair," or "builds a Hell in Heaven's despite" (William Blake).

Allegory

An extended metaphor in which characters, places, and objects carry a figurative meaning, often religious, moral, or historical. Example: John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress or Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.

Apostrophe

An address to a dead or absent person, or a personification as if he or she were present. Example: "Death, be not proud" (John Donne).

Blank Verse

Unrhyming iambic pentameter. Example: Most of Shakespeare's plays and Milton's Paradise Lost.

Caesura

A stop or pause in a metrical line, often marked by punctuation. Example: 'Dead! || One of them shot by sea in the east' (Elizabeth Barrett Browning).

Consonance

A resemblance in sound between two words, or shared consonants (e.g., 'bed' and 'bad'). Example: 'The lumpy, bumpy lump.'

Couplets

A pair of successive rhyming lines, usually of the same length. Example: 'The ladies men admire, I've heard, / Would shudder at a wicked word' (Dorothy Parker).

Elegy

A melancholy poem that laments its subject's death but ends in consolation. Example: W.H. Auden's "In Memory of W.B. Yeats."

Enjambment

The running-over of a sentence or phrase from one poetic line to the next without terminal punctuation. Example: 'the broken / pieces of a green / bottle' (William Carlos Williams).

Foot (Feet)

The basic unit of measurement of accentual-syllabic meter (e.g., an iamb or trochee). Example: One iamb (da-DUM) is a foot.

Free Verse

Nonmetrical, nonrhyming lines that closely follow the natural rhythms of speech. Example: Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Hyperbole

A figure of speech composed of a striking exaggeration. Example: "I'll love you, dear, I'll love you / Till China and Africa meet" (W.H. Auden).

Iambic Pentameter

A line of five iambs (unstressed/stressed syllables); the most common English meter. Example: 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?'

Imagery

Elements of a poem that invoke any of the five senses to create mental images. Example: 'The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes' (T.S. Eliot).

Irony

A distance between what is said and what is meant, or a contrast between reality and expectation. Example: In Oedipus Rex, the king searches for a murderer who is actually himself (Situational Irony).

Metaphor

A comparison that is made without using the words 'like' or 'as.' Example: "The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas" (Alfred Noyes).

Meter

The rhythmical pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse. Example: Iambic tetrameter (four iambs per line).

Metonymy

A figure of speech in which a related term is substituted for the object itself. Example: Using 'the crown' to refer to a monarch or 'the White House' for the President.

Octave

An eight-line stanza or poem. (Often the first 8 lines of a Petrarchan sonnet).

Oxymoron

A figure of speech that brings together contradictory words for effect. Example: 'Deafening silence' or 'bitter-sweet.'

Personification

Attributing human qualities to abstractions or inanimate objects. Example: 'The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon' (William Wordsworth).

Quatrain

A four-line stanza, rhyming or unrhyming. Example: The 'Elegiac stanza' (ABAB).

Refrain

A phrase or line repeated at intervals within a poem, especially at the end of a stanza. Example: 'Rage, rage against the dying of the light' (Dylan Thomas).

Sestet

A six-line stanza or unit of poetry. (Often the final 6 lines of a Petrarchan sonnet).

Shift / Volta

Italian for 'turn.' The turn in thought or argument in a sonnet. Context: In Petrarchan sonnets, it occurs between the octave and sestet; in Shakespearean, before the final couplet.

Simile

A comparison between two distinct things using 'like' or 'as.' Example: 'O My Luve's like a red, red rose' (Robert Burns).

Sonnet

A 14-line poem with a variable rhyme scheme. Shakespearean: 3 quatrains and a couplet (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG). Petrarchan: An octave and a sestet (ABBAABBA followed by CDCDCD or CDECDE).

Symbol

Something that reveals or is a sign for something else, often an abstract idea. Example: A white dove representing peace.

Synecdoche

A figure of speech in which a part of something stands for the whole. Example: Referring to a car as 'wheels.'

Tone

The poet's attitude toward the poem's speaker, reader, and subject matter. Example: A tone could be 'ironic,' 'somber,' 'playful,' or 'formal.'