Poetry Analysis vocab

Speaker

The narrative voice of a poem

Author

the physical person who wrote the poem

Audience

 the person or people (fictional, idealized, living, dead, imaginary, or within the narrative) a poem is written for; a text can have multiple audiences.

Tone

Author’s attitude towards the subject

Mood

The poem’s atmosphere

personification

A type of metaphor that gives life to inanimate objects

Alliteration

The repetition of the same letter or sound

Assonance

Repetition of vowel sounds

Metaphor

A figure of speech where things not generally considered similar are compared for dramatic/poetic effect.

Simile

A type of metaphor where things not generally considered similar are compared for dramatic/poetic effect using the words “like” or “as”.

Imagery

Sensory-based descriptive language

Repetition

Repeating a word or phrase for poetic/dramatic effect

Pun

a form of wordplay that exploits multiple meanings of a term, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect

Iambic pentameter

A rhythm structure, used mostly in poetry, that combines unstressed syllables and stressed syllables in groups of five. “Iambic” refers to the rhythm of an unstressed, then stressed syllable. “Pentameter” refers to the pattern occurring 5 times for a total of 10 syllables in a line.

Volta

Literally meaning “turn” in Italian, a volta is a rhetorical shift or dramatic change in thought and/or emotion. In an English sonnet, the volta occurs in the third quatrain. The volta generally marks the division of the sonnet into two parts.

Elizabethan/Shakespearean/English Sonnet

a sonnet in which the rhyme pattern is in three groups of four lines each (quatrains) and one group of two lines (couplets). Each line uses iambic pentameter (has 10 syllables). Every sonnet has 14 lines. The most common rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg.

Quatrain

 A piece of complete verse (stanza) in 4 rhymed lines that forms a unit. 

Couplet

 Two lines of verse, usually in the same rhythmic pattern (meter), that form a unit.

Meter

the pattern of beats in a line of poetry. It is a combination of the number of beats and arrangement of stresses.

Stanza

A division of a poem consisting of a series of lines arranged together in a usually recurring pattern of meter and rhyme.