Poetry Devices Flashcards
Poetry Devices
Alliteration
The repetition of consonant sounds; especially at the beginning of words. Example: “Fetched fresh; as I suppose; off some sweet wood.” Hopkins; “In the Valley of the Elwy.”
Poetry Devices
Antagonist
A character or force against which another character struggles.
Poetry Devices
Assonance
The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry or prose; as in “I rose and told him of my woe.” Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” contains assonantal “I’s”
Poetry Devices
Ballad
A narrative poem written in four-line stanzas; characterized by swift action and narrated in a direct style. The Anonymous medieval ballad; “Barbara Allan;” exemplifies the genre.
Poetry Devices
Blank verse
A line of poetry or prose in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Shakespeare’s sonnets; Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost; and Robert Frost’s meditative poems such as “Birches” include many lines of blank verse. Here are the opening blank verse lines of “Birches”: When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees; / I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
Poetry Devices
Caesura
A strong pause within a line of verse. The following stanza from Hardy’s “The Man He Killed” contains caesuras in the middle two lines:
Poetry Devices
Connotation
The associations called up by a word that goes beyond its dictionary meaning. Poets; especially; tend to use words rich in connotation. Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” includes intensely connotative language; as in these lines: “Good men; the last wave by; crying how bright / Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay; / Rage; rage against the dying of the light.”
Poetry Devices
Couplet
A pair of rhymed lines that may or may not constitute a separate stanza in a poem. Shakespeare’s sonnets end in rhymed couplets; as in “For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings.”
Poetry Devices
Denotation
The dictionary meaning of a word. Writers typically play off a word’s denotative meaning against its connotations; or suggested and implied associational implications
Poetry Devices
Elegy
A lyric poem that laments the dead. Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” is elegiac in tone. A more explicitly identified elegy is W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of William Butler Yeats” and his “Funeral Blues.”
Poetry Devices
Epic
A long narrative poem that records the adventures of a hero.
Poetry Devices
Figurative language
A form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words. Examples include hyperbole or exaggeration; litotes or understatement; simile and metaphor; which employ comparison; and synecdoche and metonymy; in which a part of a thing stands for the whole.
Poetry Devices
Flashback
An interruption of a work’s chronology to describe or present an incident that occurred prior to the main time frame of a work’s action. Writers use flashbacks to complicate the sense of chronology in the plot of their works and to convey the richness of the experience of human time.
Poetry Devices
Foot
A metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables. For example; an iamb or iambic foot is represented by _’; that is; an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. Frost’s line “Whose woods these are I think I know” contains four iambs; and is thus an iambic foot.
Poetry Devices
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.
Poetry Devices
Hyperbole
A figure of speech involving exaggeration. John Donne uses hyperbole in his poem: “Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star.”
Poetry Devices
Iamb
An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one; as in to-DAY. See Foot.
