Poetry Verse Terms

Alliteration

the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words.

Aside

a dramatic literary device that gives the audience a glimpse into the character's thoughts

Assonance

the repetition of a vowel sound or dipthong in non rhyming stressed syllables near enough to each other for the echo to be discernible.

Ballad

A poem or song narrating a story in short stanzas

Blank verse

a verse without rhyme, especially that which uses imabic pentameter

Caesura

a break between words within a metrical foot

Colliquial Language

a phrase that is common in everyday, unconstrained conversation, rather than in formal speech or academic writing.

connotiation

an idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary meaning.

Couplet

two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit.

Tercet

a poetic unit of three lines, rhymed or unrhymed

Quatrain

a stanza of four lines, especially one having alternate rhymes

Sestet

the last six lines of a sonnet

Octave

an eight-line stanza

Denotiation

the literal or primary meaning of a word, in contrast to the feelings or ideas that the word suggests

Dramatic monologue

a poem in the form of a speech or narrative by an imagined person, in which the speaker inadvertently reveals aspects of their character while describing a particular situation or series of events.

End stopped line

A metrical line ending at a grammatical boundary or break, such as a dash or closing parenthesis, or with punctuation such as a colon, or a semicolon, or a period

Enjambment

the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line, couplet, or stanza.

Form

the overarching structure or pattern of the poem

Free verse

poetry that does not rhyme or have a regular meter

Iambic pentameter

a line of verse with five metrical feet, each consisting of one short (or unstressed) syllable followed by one long (or stressed) syllable

Lyric poem

A type of poetry which expresses personal emotions or feelings, typically spoken in the first person

Meter

the pattern of beats in a line of poetry

Mood

how word choice, subject matter, and the author's tone convey an overall feeling that characterizes the emotional landscape of a poem.

Narrative poem

a form of poetry that tells a story

Onomatopoeia

the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named

Parallelism

a literary device based on repetition

Personification

figuratively describing an object with human traits in order to craft a vivid image of that object

Refrain

a word, line or phrase that repeated within the lines or stanzas of the poem itself

Repetition

the use of the same word or phrase multiple times

Rhyme

the use of similar sounding words in the lines of a verse

Internal rhyme

a rhyme involving a word in the middle of the line and another at the end of the line or in the middle of the next

End rhyme

a rhyme that occurs in the last syllables of a verse

Slant rhyme

two words that have only their final consonant sounds and no preceding vowel or consonant sound in common

Rhyme sceme

the ordered pattern of rhymes at the ends of the lines of a poem or verse

Rhyme

an audible pattern in verse established by the intervals between stressed syllables

soliloquy

a monologue in which a character in a play expresses thoughts and feeling being alone on stage

Sonnet

a fourteen line poem with a fixed rhyme scheme

Shakespearean/English sonnet

comprised of three quatrains and concluding couplet

Petrachean/Italian sonnet

a sonnet composed of a group of eight lines, and a group of six lines with two or three lines variously arranged

Spencerian sonnet

a sonnet in which the lines are grouped into three interlocked quatrains and a couplet

Speaker

the voice of the poem

Stanza

a group of lines in a poem, usually set off from the others by a blank line or indentation

Tone

the poem's attitude toward the poem's speaker, reader, and subject matter, as interpreted by the reader

Terza rima

a verse formed of iambic tercets