Poetry Terms

Front 1

Terza Rima

Back 1

interlocking three line rhyme scheme; such as Dante's "Divine Comedy" (page 595)

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Eye/sight rhyme

Back 2

similarly spelled words that don't rhyme; such as love and move

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Villanelle

Back 3

6 rhyme stanzas, 2 lines are repeated in a prescribed pattern; such as "Mod Girl's Love Song" by Sylvia Plath

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Enjambment

Back 4

continuation of a sentence over more than one line; such as in "It is a Beauteous Evening" by Wordsworth

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Anaphora

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successive phrases or lines beginning with the same words; such as in Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 66

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Caesura

Back 6

stop or pause in a line marked by punctuation or a grammatical boundary; such as in Elizabeth Browning's "Mother and Poet"

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Epistrophe

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repetition of a word at the end of successive clauses or sentences; such as in "A Long Line of Doctors" by Carolyn Kizer

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Anastrophe

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inversion of the usual order of words or clauses; such as in Longfellow's "Evangeline" or how Yoda talks in Star Wars

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Chiasmus

Back 9

figure of speech containing 2 phrases that are parallel but inverted; such as in Shakespeare's "Othello"

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Euphony

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harmonious when sounds of the words connect with the meaning in a way pleasing to the ear; such as in "Success" by Emily Dickinson

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Cacophony

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harsh discordant sound often mirroring the context in which it's used; such as in "When Maidens are Young" by Aphra Behn

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Synecdoche

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use of a significant part of a thing to stand for the whole or vice versa; wheels is a car, rhyme is poetry

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Antonomasia

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substituting a defining word or phrase for a person's name; Shakespeare is called "The Bard of Avon"

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Synesthesia

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blending of different senses in description; such as in "Aubade" by Dickinson

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Litote

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an understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite; "not the sharpest tool in the shed"

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Metonymy

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name of a thing is substituted by something else closely related to or associated with it; such as in Frost's "Out, Out"

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Parallelism

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arrangement of words, phrases, clauses, or sentences side by side in a similar grammatical or structural way; "Community" by John Donne