Poetry Terms Flashcards
(32 cards)
Caesura
A break in a line of poetry; this can sometime be used for emotional effect.
“Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind…”
Allusion
a reference to literature or scripture that calls up all of the ideas represented by that reference to support the themes and central ideas of a text.
For example, a reference to Ebeneezer Scrooge immediately invokes the idea of cruel parsimony.
Internal Rhyme
When words within a line of poetry rhyme.
Juxtaposition
Literally meaning “placing next to”. Poets can create a significant effect
(often contrast) by choosing to place one idea, word, or image next to another:
“Parents, dogs, foreigners, PREDATORY
GIRLS stand round the pond like minutes on a clock.”
Symbol
An object (living or inanimate) which stands for or represents something else.
For example, scales represent justice, the swastika Nazi Germany and Fascism, a clenched fist aggression and raised arms or a white flag surrender. Some symbols are cultural and sometimes poets create personal symbols.
Onomatopoeia
Use of words which imitate the sound they mean
e.g. splash, rustle, clatter, bang, crunch.
Stanza
Group of lines within a poem. The ballad, for example, is in four-line stanzas.
Connotation
Meaning by association which is evoked by a word, as opposed to the literal sense of a word or its strict dictionary definition which is called its denotation.
Enjambment
A line which ends before the sentence does and so the reader must carry on to the next line without a pause to find the sense.
Simile
Imaginative comparison which uses “as”, “like” or “than”.
The sentence “John is taller than Fred” is a statement of fact which does not involve the imagination. However “John is taller than two ladders” is a simile. Beware leaping to conclusions: the words “as”, “like” or “than” are used in constructions other than similes.
When you read, check that there is some kind of imaginative connection in use.
Rhyme scheme
A pattern of rhyme. In identifying a rhyme scheme we call the first line A.
If the second line rhymes with the first, this is also called A; if not it becomes B and so on all
the way through the poem.
Limericks rhyme AABBA.
Alliteration
Uses the same SOUND at the beginnings of words which are close together:
“Bruise us with Bitterness”
Enumeration
Listing. Public speaking and writing are more persuasive when examples
are enumerated.
Personification
A kind of metaphor where an object or abstract is treated as if it were
human.
Wilfred Owen describes the misery of having no shelter from the weather in “Exposure”:
Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army
Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of gray.
Metaphor
Common figurative device in which one thing is described imaginatively in terms of another.
Unlike the simile, a metaphor does not use “as”, “like” or “than”.
For example, “My vegetable love…”
Double Entendre
A double entendre is a figure of speech or a particular way of wording that is devised to have a double meaning, of which one is typically obvious, whereas the other often conveys a message that would be too socially awkward, sexually suggestive, or offensive to state directly.
Assonance
(internal) repetition of vowel sounds: “little kittens”
Synaesthesia
A kind of metaphor which mixes two senses, like ‘a blue note’ which applies a visual adjective to an auditory noun.
Hyperbole
Exaggeration for emphasis or other rhetorical effect
For example in Andrew Marvell’s carpe diem poem To His Coy Mistress:
My vegetable love should grow - Vaster than empires - , and more slow; An hundred years should got to praise Thine eyes and on thine forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest.
Metonymy
The substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant
For example suit for business executive, or the track for horse racing.
Iambic Pentameter
A line of writing that consists of ten syllables in a specific pattern of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, or a short syllable followed by a long syllable.
Volta
In a sonnet, the volta is the turn of thought or argument:
In Petrarchan or Italian sonnets it occurs between the octave and the sestet, and in Shakespearean or English before the final couplet.
Couplet
A pair of lines in a poem which rhyme.
Many scenes in Shakespeare’s plays end with a rhyming couplet. This is thought to be a useful cue for the next actors to come on stage.
Shakespearean and Spenserian sonnets end with a couplet.
Tone
the attitude the author has to his [or her] listener–which in turn affects the listener’s attitude to the literary work.
The tone may be, for example, formal, serious, or passionate; intimate, light-hearted, or calmly meditative; witty or ironic.
The term is usually used to refer to the tone of language in narrative or drama, or the tone of a narrative or lyric persona.
