Poetry terms guillory

hate it

Alliteration

the repetition of initial consonant sounds, primarily used in poetry "And how the silence surged softly backward"

Assonance

the repetition of vowel sounds followed by different consonants in two or more stressed syllables—"weak and weary"

Ballad

a song or poem that tells a story (often tragic)

Blank verse

poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter lines (does not rhyme)

Cacophony

a harsh, unpleasant combination of sounds in a line or passage in a literary work

Cadence

the natural, rhythmic rise and fall of a language as it is normally spoken

Caesura

a pause or break in a line of verse

Catalog

a list of things, people, or events

Conceit

a brief metaphor - striking a parallel between dissimilar things

Concrete poem

a poem in which the words are arranged on a page to suggest a visual representation of the subject

Connective tissue

those elements that help create coherence in a written piece.

Consonance

the repetition in 2 or more words of final consonants in stressed syllables "add - read"

Dirge

a wailing song, sung at a funeral or in commemoration of death, a short lyric lamination

Dissonance

harsh and inharmonious sounds, a marked breaking of the music of poetry, which may be intentional.

Dramatic monologue

a poem spoken by one person addressing one or more listeners

Elegy

a sustained and formal poem setting forth meditations on death or another solemn theme

End-stopped lines

lines in which both the grammatical structure and the sense reach completion at the end

Enjambment

the continuation of the sense and grammatical construction of a line on to the next verse or couplet.

Euphony

pleasing sounds

Limerick

light verse consisting of five lines or regular rhythm in which the first, second, and fifth lines (each consisting of three feet) rhyme, and the third and fourth lines (each consisting of two feet) rhyme (aabba)

Lyric

a highly musical verse that expresses the observations and feelings of a single speaker

Iamb

one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable

Trochee

one stressed followed by an unstressed

Anapest

two unstressed followed by one stressed

Dactyl

one stressed followed by two unstressed

Spondee

two strong stresses

Pyrrhic

foot with 2 unstressed syllables

Amphibrach

unstressed syllable, followed by a stressed, followed by another unstressed

Amphimacer

stressed, unstressed, stressed

Ode

a single, unified strain of exalted lyrical verse, directed to a single purpose, and dealing with one theme

Quatrain

a stanza or poem made up of four lines

Refrain

a repeated line or group of lines in a poem or song

Sestet

the second, six-line division of an Italian sonnet

Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet

consists of an octave and a sestet, usually rhyming abbaabba cdecde

Speaker

the voice of a poem

Villanelle

a nineteen-line poem consisting of five tercets (three-line stanzas) with the rhyme scheme aba and with a final quatrain (four-line stanza) of abaa

Volta

the turn in thought—from question to answer, problem to solution—that occurs at the beginning of the sestet in an Italian sonnet