APLit Poetry Vocab #2

Eye rhyme

rhyme that appears correct from spelling, but is half-rhyme/slant rhyme from the pronunciation

Examples of eye rhyme

“Watch” and “match”

“Love” and “move”

Feminine rhyme

a rhyme of two syllables, one stressed and one unstressed; sometimes called “double rhyme”

Examples of feminine rhyme

“Waken” and “forsaken”

“Audition” and “rendition”

Free verse

poetry which is not written in a traditional meter or rhyme scheme

Example of free verse

“so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.”

Heroic couplet

two end-stopped iambic pentameter lines rhymed aa, bb, cc with the thought usually completed in the two-line unit

Example of heroic couplet

“But when to mischief mortals bend their will,

How soon they find fit instruments of ill!”

Internal rhyme

rhyme that occurs within a line, rather than at the end

Example of internal rhyme

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore -

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping…”

Lyric poem

any short poem that presents a single speaker who expresses thoughts and feelings

• Love lyrics are common, but lyric poems have also been written on subjects as different as religion and reading

Examples of lyric poems

sonnets and odes

Masculine rhyme

rhyme that falls on the stressed and concluding syllables of the rhyme words

Examples of masculine rhyme

“Keep” and “sleep”

“Glow” and “no”

“Spell” and “impel”

Meter

the repetition of a regular rhythmic unit in a line of poetry

• Emphasizes the musical quality of the language and often relates directly to the subject matter of the poem

• Unit of meter: foot

Metonymy

a figure of speech which is characterized by the substitution of a term naming an object closely associated with the word in mind for the word itself

Example of metonymy

referring to the king as “the crown,” an object closely associated with kingship

Narrative poem

a non-dramatic poem which tells a story or presents a narrative, whether simple or complex, long or short

Examples of narrative poems

epics and ballads

Octave

an eight-line stanza

• Refers to the first division of an Italian sonnet (most commonly)

Poetic foot

a group of syllables in verse usually consisting of one accented syllable and one or two unaccented syllables associated with it

Common type of feet in poems

iambic u /

trochaic / u

anapestic u u /

dactylic / u u

pyrrhic u u

spondaic / /

(u = unstressed, / = stressed)

Example of feet (except pyrrhic foot)

“Trochee trips from long to short.

From long to long in solemn sort

Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot! yet ill able

Ever to come up with Dactyl trisyllable.

Iambics march from short to long;

With a leap and bound the swift Anapests throng.”

Pun

a play on words that are identical or similar in sound but have sharply diverse meanings

Example of pun

“The duck said to the bartender ‘put it on my bill.’” 😂

Quatrain

a four-line stanza with any combination of rhymes

Refrain

a group of words forming a phrase or sentence and consisting of one or more lines repeated at intervals in a poem, usually at the end of a stanza