POETRY

• Allegory

  A symbolic narrative in which the surface details imply a secondary meaning. Allegory often takes the form of a story in which the characters represent moral qualities.
• Alliteration

  The repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the beginning of words.
• Anapest

  Two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one, as in com-pre-HEND or in-ter-VENE. An anapestic meter rises to the accented beat
• Assonance

  The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry
• Ballad

  A narrative poem written in four-line stanzas, characterized by swift action and narrated in a direct style.
• Blank verse

  A line of poetry or prose in unrhymed iambic pentameter
• Caesura

  A strong pause within a line of verse.
• Dactyl

  A stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones, as in FLUT-ter-ing or BLUE-ber-ry.
• Elegy

  A lyric poem that laments the dead.
• Elision

  The omission of an unstressed vowel or syllable to preserve the meter of a line of poetry.
• free verse

  Poetry without a regular pattern of meter or rhyme. The verse is "free" in not being bound by earlier poetic conventions requiring poems to adhere to an explicit and identifiable meter and rhyme scheme in a form such as the sonnet or ballad. Modern and contemporary poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries often employ free verse.
• Hyperbole

  A figure of speech involving exaggeration. John Donne uses hyperbole in his poem:
• Iamb

  An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, as in to-DAY.
• lyric poem

  A type of poem characterized by brevity, compression, and the expression of feeling.
• meter

  The measured pattern of rhythmic accents in poems
• metonymy

  A figure of speech in which a closely related term is substituted for an object or idea. "We have always remained loyal to the crown."
• Octave

  An eight-line unit
• Ode

  A long, stately poem in stanzas of varied length, meter, and form.
• onomatopoeia

  -The use of words to imitate the sounds they describe. Words such as buzz and crack are onomatopoetic.

  -Most often, however, onomatopoeia refers to words and groups of words, such as Tennyson's description of the "murmur of innumerable bees," which attempts to capture the sound of a swarm of bees buzzing.
• quatrain

  A four-line stanza in a poem
• Sestet

  A six-line unit of verse constituting a stanza or section of a poem
• sonnet

  A fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter.
• Synecdoche

  A figure of speech in which a part is substituted for the whole. An example: "Lend me a hand."
• tercet

  a three line stanza
• Trochee

  An accented syllable followed by an unaccented one, as in FOOT-ball.
• iambic pentameter


  unstressed-stressed
• Ballad

  ABAB or ABCB
• Coupled rhyme


  AA, BB, CC, etc.
• Terza rima

  ABA BCB CDC, etc.
• Villanelle


  ABA ABA ABA ABA ABA ABAA (full)
• Alternating rhyme

  ABAB
• Monorhyme

  AAAA
• Enclosed rhyme

  ABBA