Poetry Terms 2023 Flashcards
Words used to allow the reader to experience/envision sound while reading.
Example: To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells…(Poe, The Bells)
Auditory imagery (Addison)
Where one object or idea takes the place of another with which it has a close association.
Example: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” (Julias Caesar)
Metonymy (Robyn)
When the writer uses the same stressed vowel or consonant sounds. Exact rhymes usually appear at the ends of lines, creating a perfect rhyme scheme.
Ex. “now” and “cow”
Exact Rhyme (Caleb)
When the writer uses the same stressed vowel or consonant sounds.
Ex. now and cow
Exact Rhyme (Olivia)
When one refers to a meaning that is implied by a word apart from the thing which it describes explicitly
Example: “There’s no place like home.” Home isn’t just a building you live in but a welcoming familiar place.
Connotation (Robyn)
When more than one sentence is centered around one metaphor. “Bobby Holloway says my imagination is a three-hundred-ring circus. Currently I was in ring two hundred and ninety-nine, with elephants dancing and clowns cart wheeling and tigers leaping through rings of fire. The time had come to step back, leave the main tent, go buy some popcorn and a Coke, bliss out, cool down.” -Excerpt from “Seize the Night” by Dean Koontz.
Extended Metaphor (John)
When are part of something is used to represent the whole.
Ex. Figures of speech (“nice ride”- referring to a car)
Synecdoche
When an idea or sentence is divided onto more than one line.
Ex. “Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”
Enjambment (Maddie)
Uses qualities of how something looks visually to best create an image in the reader’s head. “On broken blinds and chimney-pots,/And at the corner of the street/A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps./And then the lighting of the lamps” -Excerpt from “Prelude” by T.S. Elliot.
Visual Imagery (John)
Two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit.
Ex. “Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.” (Shakespeare, Song of the Witches)
Couplet (Sarah)
Two consecutive lines of poetry that typically rhyme or have the same meter.
Ex. “That day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches. / And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches.” (Dr. Seuss, Sneetches)
Couplet (Claire)
A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by an unaccented syllable.
Ex. “And the RA-ven, NE-ver, FLIT-ting, STILL is SIT-ting, STILL is SIT-ting”
Trochaic Feet (David)
This is the repetition of grammatical elements in writing and speaking.
Example: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” -Neil Armstrong
Parallelism (Robyn)
The use of words with sharp, harsh, hissing, and unmelodious sounds
Example: ”‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,an
And the mome raths outgrabe.” (Lewis Carroll)
Cacophony (sara)
The use of language to exaggerate the intended meaning of the phrase.
Ex. “You should have seen that alligator, it was as large as two of my legs.”
Overstatement (Kylea)
the use of figurative language to evoke a sensory experience or create a picture with words for a reader by appealing to the sense of sight through the description of color, light, size, pattern, etc.
Example: “This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.” (Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)
Visual Imagery (Erin)
The systematic arrangement of language in a series of rhythmic movements involving stressed and unstressed syllables.
Ex. “Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.”
Meter (different types) (Isabella)
The rules and principles that govern sentence structure in a language
Ex. We ate fish for dinner OR For dinner ate we fish
Syntax (Meili)
The rhythm of a line of a verse.
Ex. That you I are mus I ic ev I ‘rywhere (Iambic Foot)
Scansion (Kylea)
The repetition of the same consonant sounds in a line of text. (Note: the sounds are not always made by the same letter and are not always at the beginning of the words.)
Example: ‘n’ and ‘h’ sounds in the quote, “Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high about the howling of the storm…” (Melville, Moby Dick)
Consonance (Erin)
The repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds in a series of words, syllables, or phrases.
Ex: great lakes, hop-scotch, surf and turf, etc.
Assonance (Ellery)
The projection of characteristics that normally belong only to humans onto inanimate objects/animals
Ex. The sun smiled down on them
Personification (Meili)
The occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words.
Ex: The Enthusiastic Eel ate edamame.
Alliteration (Lia)
a form of poetry that is used to tell a story
ex) Dr. Seuss’s stories
Narrative Poem (Elise)
The mood implied by an author’s word choice and the way that the text can make a reader feel. “His eye was like the eye of a vulture, the eye of one of those terrible birds that watch and wait while an animal dies, and then fall upon the dead body and pull it to pieces to eat it.” Excerpt from “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe (violent).
Tone (John)
The literal definition of the word
Ex. Your home is where you live
Denotation (Ella)
the first and third lines have a word rhyming with each other at the end, as do the second and fourth lines
ex) The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Quatrain (Elise)
The continuation of a sentence or clause across a line break.
Ex.
“What does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease,
No man, woman, or child alive could please
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh
Because I sit and frame an epitaph-
‘Here lies all that no one loved of him
And that loved no one.’ Then in a trice that whim
Has wearied. . . ” (Thomas, Beauty)
Enjambment (Richard)
The combining of words to create a pleasing sound
Ex. “A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.”
Euphony (Caleb)
The combining of words to create a pleasing sound.
Ex. “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 18)
Euphony (Sarah)
The authors attitude towards the subject or audience of a literally work
Ex. The author uses a saddened tone when writing his piece
Tone (Ella)
the use of figurative language to evoke a sensory experience or create a picture with words for a reader by appealing to the sense of touch by describing how something physically feels, such as its temperature, texture, or other sensation.
Example: “The murex Dr. Geffard keeps on his desk can entertain her for a half hour, the hollow spines, the ridged whorls, the deep entrance; it’s a forest of spikes and cakes and textures…” (Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See)
Tactile Imagery (Erin)
A technique used to present ideas, characters, or places in such a manner that they appeal to more than one sense (hearing, sight, smell, touch) at a given time.
Example: “With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz” (Dying, Emily Dickinson)
Synesthesia (Sara)
Specialized language for a particular field or activity that is often hard to understand outside the field or activity or slang
Ex. Nurse to room 21, stat
Jargon (Kaitlin)
Special words or expressions used by a group of people that are hard for others to understand.
Ex. inside jokes, slang, legal words
Jargon
Something absurd or self-contradictory.
Ex. “I must be cruel, only to be kind.” -Hamlet
Paradox (Kylea)
Sestet originates from the Italian word sestetto, which means “sixth.” It has six lines and also refers to a poem of six lines, or a six-lined stanza in a poem.
Sestet (Cameron)
Rhythms in poems from stressed syllables.
Ex. iambic pentameter(da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum)
Meter
Rhyming with words that sounds similar but are not exactly the same
Ex. streets and cheap
Inexact/Slant Rhyme (Olivia)
Repetition of the same consonant sounds in a line of text.
Ex. “This grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt bird of yore”
Consonance (Maddie)
Repetition of similar vowel sounds in two or more words in proximity within a line of poetry/prose.
ex. “I do not like green eggs and HAM. I do not like them SAM I AM.”(Green Eggs and Ham, Dr. Seuss)
Assonance(Henry)
Giving something that isn’t human traits or characteristics of a person.
ex. the sun smiled down on us
Personification (Joey)
