Lit Terms Flashcards
assonance
The repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds, usually in stressed syllable, followed by different consonant sounds in proximate words. Assonance is different from perfect rhyme in that rhyming words also repeat the final consonant sounds.
Examples: “fate” and “cave” show assonance; “fate” and “late” show perfect rhyme. In the opening stanza of D. H. Lawrence’s “Love on the Farm” (1928), large, dark, and are; hands, at, and Grasping; those and golden; window, in, its, and wind; weaves and evening; and the ing suffixes are all assonant. Only light and delight rhyme:
What large, dark hands are those at the window
Grasping in the golden light
Which weaves its way through the evening wind
At my heart’s delight?
(knows, controls, radios, chose, road, hoes, so, rose, woes, negroes, and nose)
from Public Enemy’s “Do You Wanna Go Our Way”
consonance
The repetition of a final consonant sound or sounds following different vowel sounds in proximate words (made/wood). Most scholars maintain that the repetition of initial or intermediate consonant sounds, when occurring in addition to repeated final consonant sounds, also constitutes consonance (litter/letter, wade/wood).
Examples: Emily Dickinson’s poem #214(c.1860) uses consonance rather than perfect rhyme in the words Pearl and Alcohol as well as in the words brewed, scooped, and Yield.
I taste a liquor never brewed–
From Tankards scooped in Pearl–
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!
Wilfred Owen’s “Arms and the Boy” (1920) provides an example of consonance in which initial as well as final consonant sounds are repeated (in the words blade and blood, flash and flesh):
Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.
lyric
From the Greek for “lyre,” originally any poem designed to be sung while accompanied by a lyre; now a brief imaginative and melodic poem characterized by the fervent but structured expression of the personal thought and emotions of a single, first-person speaker. Lyrics are non-narrative poems; they do not tell a story. During ancient Roman times, poets such as Horace wrote lyrics meant to be read, unaccompanied by music, as remains common today.
The lyric, a popular form of verse for millennia in the East and west alike, is one of the oldest, most enduring forms of literary expression in English. Common manifestations include the ballad, hymn, ode, and sonnet. Today, the plural form of the term (lyrics) also refers to the words of any song.
Italian Sonnet (Petrarchan sonnet)
A fourteen-line sonnet consisting of two parts: the octave, eight lines with the rhyme scheme abbaabba; and the sestet, six lines usually following the rhyme scheme cdecde (or sometimes cdcdcd). The octave often poses a question or dilemma that the sestet answers or resolves.
The Italian sonnet originated in Italy in the thirteenth century, but its best-known proponent in the fourteenth-century poet Petrarch, hence its alternative name. English poets who have used this form have tended to take greater liberties with the rhyme scheme.
chiasmus
A rhetorical figure in which certain words, sounds, concepts, or syntactic structures are reversed or repeated in reverse order. The term chiasmus is derived from the x-shaped Greek letter chi; the implication is that the two parts of a chiastic whole mirror each other as do the parts of the x.
Examples: Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “Fair is foul and foul is fair.”
Coleridge, “flowers are lovely, love is flowerlike.” and “In Xanadu did Kuble Khan…”
JFK, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” and “Let us never negotiate our of fear but let us never fear to negotiate.”
Pope from “An Essay on Criticism” (1711): art “works without show and without pomp presides.” verb, prep phrase, prep phrase, verb.
elegy
In ancient Greek and Roman times, any poem composed in elegaic meter (pairs of hexameter and pentameter line composed primarily of dactyls). In Elizabethan times, elegy was often used to refer to love poems. Since the seventeenth century, the term typically referred to reflective poems that lament the loss of someone or something (or loss or death more generally) but may also be used even more broadly to refer to any serious, reflective poem. Elegies written in English frequently take the form of the pastoral elegy. (((ADD EXAMPLE)))
epic
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ode
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pathos
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