Poetry Terms

Alliteration

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

Symbolism

An object or action that stands for something beyond itself.

Verse

Writing arranged with a metrical rhythm, typically having a rhyme