Glossary

Alliteration

repetition of sounds, usually the first letters of successive words, or words that are close together. Alliteration usually applies only to consonants.

Anapest

see under foot.

Assonance

repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds.

Ballad

originally a song which tells a story, often involving dialogue. Characteristically, the storyteller's own feelings are not expressed.

Caesura

strong pause in a line of verse, usually appearing in the middle of a line and marked with a comma, semi-colon, or a full stop.

Couplet

pair of rhymed lines, often used as a way of rounding off a sonnet; hence the term ‘closing couplet’.

Dactyl

see under foot.

Dialogue

spoken exchange between characters, usually in drama and fiction but also sometimes in poetry.

Diction

writer's choice of words. Poetic diction might be described, for instance, as formal or informal, elevated or colloquial.

Elegy

poem of loss, usually mourning the death of a public figure, or someone close to the poet.

Ellipsis

omission of words from a sentence to achieve brevity and compression.

Enjambment

the use of run-on lines in poetry. Instead of stopping or pausing at the end of a line of poetry, we have to carry on reading until we complete the meaning in a later line. The term comes from the French for ‘striding’.

Epic

a long narrative poem dealing with events on a grand scale, often with a hero above average in qualities and exploits.

Epigram

witty, condensed expression. The closing couplet in some of Shakepeare's sonnets is often described as an epigram.

Foot

a unit of metre with a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. In the examples that follow, a stressed syllable is indicated by ‘/’, and an unstressed syllable by ‘x’: anapest: xx/; dactyl: /xx; iamb: x/; spondee: //; trochee: /x

Heroic couplet

iambic pentameter lines rhyming in pairs, most commonly used for satiric or didactic poetry, and particularly favoured in the eighteenth century.

Iamb

see under foot.

Iambic pentameter

a line consisting of five iambs.

Imagery

special use of language in a way that evokes sense impressions (usually visual). Many poetic images function as mental pictures that give shape and appeal to something otherwise vague and abstract; for example, ‘yonder before us lie/Deserts of vast Eternity’. Simile and metaphor are two types of imagery.

Metaphor

image in which one thing is substituted for another, or the quality of one object is identified with another. The sun, for Shakespeare, becomes ‘the eye of heaven’.

Metre

(from the Greek metron, 'measure’) measurement of a line of poetry, including its length and its pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. There are different metres in poetry. Most sonnets, for example, written in English are divided into lines of ten syllables with five stresses – a measure known as pentameter (from the Greek pente for ‘five’). The sonnet also tends to use a line (known as the iambic line) in which an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed one, as in this line: ‘If I should die, think only this of me’. Most sonnets, then are written in iambic pentameters.

Narrative

the telling of a series of events (either true or fictitious). The person relating these events is the narrator. However, it is often more usual in poetry to refer to ‘the speaker’.

Octave

group of eight lines of poetry, often forming the first part of a sonnet.

Ode

a poem on a serious subject, usually written in an elevated formal style; often written to commemorate public events.

Onomatopoeia

a word that seems to imitate the sound or sounds associated with the object or action, for example, ‘cuckoo’.

Ottava rima

a poem in eight-line stanzas, rhyming a b a b a b c c.

Personification

writing about something not human as if it were a person, for example ‘Busy old fool, unruly Sun,/Why dost thou thus,/Through windows and through curtains call onus?’.

Poetic inversion

reversing the order of normal speech in order to make the words fit a particular rhythm, or rhyme, or both.

Pun

double meaning or ambiguity in a word, often employed in a witty way. Puns are often associated with wordplay.

Quatrain

group of four lines of poetry, usually rhymed.

Refrain

a line or phrase repeated throughout a poem, sometimes with variations, often at the end of each stanza.

Rhyme

echo of a similar sound, usually at the end of a line of poetry. Occasionally, internal rhymes can be found, as in: ‘Sister, my sister, O fleet, sweet swallow’.

Rhyme scheme

pattern of rhymes established in a poem. The pattern of rhymes in a quatrain, for instance, might be ‘a b a b’ or ‘a b b a’.

Rhythm

the pattern of beats or stresses in a line creating a sense of movement. Sestet: group of six lines of poetry, often forming the second part of a sonnet.

Simile

image in which one thing is likened to another. The similarity is usually pointed out with the word ‘like’ or ‘as’: ‘My love is like a red, red rose’.

Sonnet

fourteen iambic pentameter lines with varying rhyme schemes.

Spondee

see under foot.

Syllable

single unit of pronunciation. ‘Sun’ is one syllable; ‘sunshine’ is two syllables.

Tercet

group of three lines in poetry, sometimes referred to as a triplet. Trochee: see under foot.

Turn

distinctive movement of change in mood or thought or feeling. In the sonnet, the turn usually occurs between the octave and the sestet, though the closing couplet in Shakespeare's sonnets often constitutes the turn.

Villanelle

an intricate French verse form with some lines repeated, and only two rhyme sounds throughout the five three-line stanzas and the final four-line stanza.