Poetry language and structure techniques
Allegory – a narrative that often appears in the form of an extended meaning, or where a story has an underlying, deeper meaning or moral significance
Alliteration – repetition of the same sound or letter at the beginning of words close to each other, e.g. ‘A brilliant breaking of the bank’ (Philip Larkin, ‘Annus Mirabilis’)
Allusion – a reference to matters outside the text
Ambiguity – when an aspect of a text has two possible meanings
Antithesis – the placing of ideas side by side for contrast
Antonyms – words opposite in meaning
Apostrophe – when the speaker of a poem turns away from the subject being considered to address an absent person or an object
Assonance – repetition of similar vowel sounds in words close to one another, e.g. ‘grooves’ and ‘smoothed’
Asyndeton – listing without conjunctions, such as ‘and’
Ballad – a poem which tells a story, usually written in quatrains
Blank verse – unrhymed poetry written in iambic pentameter
Cliché – stereotyped phrases that are used too often and have therefore lost their appeal, e.g. ‘like two peas in a pod’
Climax – the decisive moment in a text but also words, phrases or ideas placed in ascending order, e.g. ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’
Colloquialism / slang – words or phrases from ordinary speech
Couplet – a pair of unrhymed lines, often with the same metre, e.g.
Doggerel – simple verse which is often cynical and humorous
Double-negative – the use of two negatives, e.g. ‘I do not know nothing’
Dramatic monologue – a poem which is addressed to an invisible recipient and spoken in the first person
Elegy – a reflective poem or lament, often dealing with death or mourning
Enjambment – a run-on line in a poem, found at the end of a line where there is no punctuation but the meaning / sense continues into the next line uninterrupted, e.g.
Epic – a long, narrative poem telling the story of a historical figure or event
Epithalamium – a marriage song
Euphemism – a figure of speech which substitutes a milder expression for an unpleasant one, e.g. ‘letting someone go’ rather than ‘fired’ or ‘sacked’
Free verse – poetry with no regular rhyme or metre.
Half-rhyme – rhyme which only rhymes approximately but not fully, e.g. ‘heat’ and ‘heal’
Hyperbole – exaggeration for emphasis, e.g. ‘Sue ran as fast as greased lightning’
Iambic pentameter – a line of ten syllables, divided into five pairs, or feet, each with an unstressed syllable, followed by a stressed one. It is traditionally associated with the sonnet form
Idyll – a poem painting a small picture of simple country life, e.g. William Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’
Image – a picture or sense impression built up by the poet in words
Internal rhyme – a word in the middle of a line that rhyme with the word at the end
Irony – words or phrases which mean something different from the literal meaning, e.g. saying ‘You are a clever boy!’ to a boy who is not very intelligent
Limerick – a form of nonsense verse, consisting of a five lined stanza, rhyming aabba and the third and fourth lines being shorter than the others
Lyric – a poem with a musical or song like quality, focusing on a significant moment in the poet’s life, often about the emotions that the event creates
Metaphor – a comparison of one thing with another without using ‘like’ or ‘as’, e.g. ‘Her body a bulb in the cold’ (Sylvia Plath, ‘Wintering)
Metonymy – when attributes are substituted for the actual names of things, e.g. ‘the kettle is boiling’ (rather than the water in the kettle); ‘he is addicted to the bottle’ (rather than the alcohol itself)
Metre or rhythm – the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry. Some sound patterns are regular; others are less regular.
A short beat is indicated below by a .
A long beat is indicated below by a /
There are four main metrical feet:
. / . /
the iambus – a rising rhythm of two syllables, e.g. em ploy in vite
/ . / .
the trochee – a falling rhythm of two syllables, e.g. fal ling beach es
. . /
the anapest – a rising rhythm of three syllables, e.g. sh ve ring
/ . .
the dactyl – a falling rhythm of three syllables, e.g. in se cure
Narrative poem – a poem that tells a story (see also ballad)
Ode – an address or a tribute, in praise of something
Onomatopoeia – the use of words which sound like their meaning, e.g. ‘slap’, ‘plop’
Oxymoron – contradictory words and phrases juxtaposed for effect, e.g. ‘cruel kindness’
Paradox – a statement which features opposite ideas, e.g. ‘I am old but I am young’. On the surface, paradoxes are contradictions. They allow a writer to convey confusion, frustration or tension
Pathetic fallacy – when nature / the environment reflects the mood of what is being described
Personification – giving an object or idea human shape or form
Pun – a play on words, e.g. ‘not on thy sole, but on thy soul’
Quatrain – a verse with four lines
Rhyme – patterns of sound. Words can have full rhyme (e.g. ‘slime’ and ‘chime’) or half-rhyme (see above)
Rhyme scheme – the pattern of rhyming sounds at the ends of lines in a poem. This is usually noted alphabetically, beginning with an a for the first line
Simile – a comparison of one thing with another, introduced by ‘like’ or ‘as’, e.g. ‘The classroom glowed like a sweet shop’ (Carol Ann Duffy, ‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’)
Sonnet – a poem of fourteen lines, which, conventionally, has a regular rhyme scheme and uses iambic pentameter
Stanza – a poem is organised into groups of lines, known as stanzas or verses
Stream of consciousness – allowing one idea to follow another in an unstructured way. It feels closer to the way we dream rather than the way we might usually write, in an orderly sequence
Syllable – we can break words down into single units of sound; words of one syllable are known as monosyllabic; words with multiple syllables are known as polysyllabic
Symbol – something used to represent something else because it has qualities that reflect the characteristics of the thing it is representing
Tone – the writer’s voice – e.g. serious, humorous, neutral, sarcastic. The tone of a poem may change as it develops