Poetry Vocab

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A comparison (see Metaphor) made with “as,” “like,” or “than.” In “A Red, Red Rose,” Robert Burns declares:

O my Luve is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Luve is like the melody
That’s sweetly played in tune.

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SIMILE

Front 2

A comparison that is made directly

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty” from “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

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METAPHOR

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A figure of speech in which the poet describes an abstraction, a thing, or a nonhuman form as if it were a person.

“O Rose, thou art sick!”

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PERSONIFICATION

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Idioms exist in every language. An idiom is a word or phrase that is not taken literally.

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IDIOM

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A figure of speech composed of a striking exaggeration.

The sea him lent those bitter tears Which at his eyes he always wears; And from the winds the sighs he bore, Which through his surging breast do roar.No day he saw but that which breaks Through frighted clouds in forkèd streaks, While round the rattling thunder hurled As at the funeral of the world.

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HYPERBOLE

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The repetition of initial stressed, consonant sounds in a series of words within a phrase or verse line. Alliteration need not reuse all initial consonants; “pizza” and “place” alliterate. Example: “We saw the sea sound sing, we heard the salt sheet tell,” from Dylan Thomas’s “Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed.”

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ALLITERATION

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A figure of speech in which the sound of a word imitates its sense (for example, “choo-choo,” “hiss,” or “buzz”). In “Piano,”D.H. Lawrence describes the “boom of the tingling strings” as his mother played the piano, mimicking the volume and resonance of the sound (“boom”) as well as the fine, high-pitched vibration of the strings that produced it (“tingling strings”)

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ONOMATOPOEIA

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An address to a deity or muse that often takes the form of a request for help in composing the poem at hand. Invocations can occur at the beginning of the poem or start of a new canto; they are considered conventions of the epic form and are a type of apostrophe. See the opening of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Alexander Pope mocked the convention in the first canto of “The Rape of the Lock.” A contemporary example is Denise Levertov’s poem “Invocation.”

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INTERNAL RHYME

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The repetition of syllables, typically at the end of a verse line.

And here on this turning of the stair
Between passion and doubt,
I pause and say a double prayer,
One for you, and one for you;
And so they cancel out.

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RHYME SCHEME

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The rhythmical pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse. The predominant meter in English poetry isaccentual-syllabic. See also accentual meter, syllabic meter, and quantitative meter. Falling meter refers to trochees anddactyls (i.e., a stressed syllable followed by one or two unstressed syllables). Iambs and anapests (i.e., one or two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one) are called rising meter. See also foot.

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METER

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Letters in capital.

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CAPITAL LETTERS

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The length of the line.

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LINE LENGTH

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Position of the word.

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WORD POSITION