Glossary
| Ballad | A simple narrative poem in short stanzas, usually sentimental in nature. |
| Caesura | A pause in a line of verse, usually in the middle. |
| Couplet | A stanza of two lines. |
| Elegy | A serious, mournful or reflective poem. Classical elegies feature either couplets of hexameter and pentameter lines, or two stanzas of four iambic pentameters, rhyming abab. |
| Enjambement | Where the sense continues over a line-break. |
| Envoi | The concluding stanza of poems written in certain metrical forms. |
| Epic | Long narrative poem that relates heroic events in an elevated style. |
| Free verse | Poetry that works against traditional conventions of metre, rhyme, line length, etc. |
| Haiku | Japanese poem with three lines of five, seven and five syllables. |
| Limerick | Humorous poem in a five-line form. |
| Metre | The pattern of groups of syllables within a poem. |
| Muse | The inspiration for a writer. |
| Octave | A stanza of eight lines. |
| Ode | A poem intended to be sung, often of great length and generally addressed to someone or something. |
| Onomatopoeia | When a word sounds like its meaning, e.g. ‘hiss’. |
| Poem | A composition in verse. |
| Prose poem | A poem with few or no line-breaks. |
| Quatrain | A stanza of four lines. |
| Rhyme | Where words sound the same, usually at the ends of lines. |
| Rhyme scheme | The pattern of rhymed line-endings in a poem. These are described using letters, e.g. abab. |
| Rhythm | A regular pattern of sounds. |
| Sestet | A stanza of six lines. |
| Sonnet | A short poem of 14 lines, each containing 10 or 11 syllables. |
| Stanza | A unit, or verse, in a poem. |
| Tercet | A stanza of three lines. |
| Trope | A figure of speech in which a word or expression is used in other than its literal sense. |
| Verse | A unit, or stanza, of a poem. |
| Villanelle | A poem of 19 lines, comprising 5 tercets and a quatrain. It has two rhymes. Line 1 is repeated as lines 6, 12, and 18. Line 3 is repeated as lines 9, 15 and 19. |