Types of Poems & Songs Flashcards
- Term for the literary form that burlesques (mocks) the epic by treating a trivial subject in “grand style” or uses the epic formulas to make a trivial subject ridiculously by ludicrously overacting it.
- Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” is an example | | in polished verse the trivialities of polite society. The cutting of a lock of hair elevated into a grandiose event.
Mock Epic
•A song or short narrative poem.
Lay or Lai
- A stanzaic pattern named for a Greek poet-a woman who wrote love lyrics of great beauty (600 B.C.)
- Consists of 3 lines of 11 syllables each: (-UU|–|-UU|-U|-U) & a 4th line of 5 syllables: (-UU|-U)
- Hardy was one of the most successful modern writers of -
- Below is the opening stanza of Hardy’s “The Temporary the All”:| |
Sapphic
•An elaborate, dignified, & imaginative lyric verse, directed to a single purpose or dealing w/ 1 theme.
•In English there are 3 types:
1) Pindaric- Gray’s “The Bard”
2) | |- Collins’ “- to Evening”
3) irregular- Wordsworth’s “-: Intimations of Immortality”
•For his -s, Keats devised his own form.
Ode
- Italian sonnet + a tail of 3 lines
* Rarely in English form
Caudate Sonnet
- A work expressing moods appropriate to evening or nighttime.
- Also called a SERENADE.
Nocturne
- A poem containing - imagery (shepherds & rustic life) written in dignified, serious language, having a theme of grief @ the loss of a friend or important person.
- A combining of the - eclogue & the -. Note: In many –, the shepherd becomes a code word for “poet.” Accordingly, almost any poet’s - for another poet-such as W.H. Auden’s for W.B. Yeats- will display some - elements.
Pastoral Elegy
•A system for describing conventional rhythms by dividing lines into feet, indicating accents & counting syllables.
Scansion
- Verse expressing grief or tribulation.
- A lament.
- A complaint/lyric poem in which the poet laments his unresponsive mistress, | | his unhappy lot in life, or regrets the sorry state of the world.
Plaint
•A short lyric, usually dealing w/ love or a pastoral theme & designed for, or suitable for, a musical setting.
Madrigal
•The text or book, containing thursday story, tale, or plot of an opera or of any long musical composition-a cantata, for instance.
Liberetto
•An Irish funeral song.
Keen
- A composition, usually verse, arranged in such a way that it spells words, phrases, or sentences when certain letters are selected according to an orderly sequence.
- True –1 in which the INITIAL letters form a word.
- Telestitch-1 in which the FINAL letters form a word.
- Mesostitch-1 in which the MIDDLE letters form a word.
- Abecedarius-1 in which the initial letters form the alphabet.
- Double – ingenious word puzzles in which the 1st letters of the names of an author & a work come @ the beginnings of words composed of patters from a quote from that work.
Acrostic
- A type of Japanese poetry similar to Haiku.
* Consists of 31 syllables arranged in 5 lines, each of 7 syllables, except the 1st & 3rd which have 5 syllables.
Tanka
- A morning song, as of birds.
* The plural refers to the 1st of the Catholic Church @ which prescribed prayers are sung.
Matin
- A 3 lines stanza w/ interlocking rhyme scheme (aba bcb cdc ded…), usually written in iambic pentameter.
- Has been popular w/ many English poets including Milton, Shelly, Byron, Yeats & Auden.
- The rhyme scheme, but not the usual meter, was used by Hardy.
Terza Rima
•An acrostic in which the final letter forms a word.
Telestitch
- A short lyric, usually dealing w/ love or a pastoral theme & designed for a musical setting.
- Elizabethan-no accompaniment
Madrigal
- A term used for pastoral writing that deals w/ rural life in a manner rather formal & fanciful.
- refers collectively to the pastoral literature of such writers as the ancients Theocritus & Virgil.
- In the present loose usage, it refers to poetry w/ a rustic background-as in W.H. Auden’s mixed sequence called -.
Bucolic
•Unrhymed verse-usually iambic pentameter.
Blank Verse
•One of the most popular of the artificial French verse forms.
•3 stanzas & an envoy
1. Refrain
2. Envoy
3.Use of only 3 or 4 rhymes in the entire poem.
•Chaucer’s “- de bon conseyl” & Rossetti’s “- of Dead Ladies”.
Ballade
•Poetry in which the closing syllables of 1 line are repeated in the following line-& usually making up that line- w/ a different meaning & thus making a reply or a comment.
•Flourished in the 16th & 17th centuries in pastoral poetry & drama.
•Hardy’s “The Elf– Answers” begins:
“How much I | | how?
For life, or not long?”
-Not long.
Echo Verse
- A flexible lyric form, usually in a small # of couplets w/ or w/o rhyme
- 1st used in various Middle Eastern literatures & later among the German romanticists & recently among American poets.
- William Barne’s “Woak Hill” & “In the Spring” are examples-Thomas Hardy’s poems “My Cicely” & “A Mother Mourns” resemble -.
Ghazal
- Brief subjective poem strongly marked by imagination, melody, & emotion, creating a single, unified impression.
- The most frequently used poetic expression.
- Includes hymns, sonnets, songs, ballads, odes, elegies, ballades, rondels, & rondeaus.
Lyric
•A ballad composed by an author, as opposed to the anonymous folk ballad.
Literary Ballad
•Thoughts are in 3 quatrains & a couplet.
-abab cdcd efef gg
Shakespearian/English Sonnet
•An English sonnet in which the 3 quatrains are linked by repeating the 2nd rhyme of 1 quatrain as the 1st rhyme of the succeeding quatrain.
-An interlocking rhyme scheme.
•Te Spenserian sonnet is 1.
Link Sonnet
•A sonnet of the English type in that it has the thoughts arranged in 3 quatrains & a couplet but features an interlocking rhyme scheme of
abab bcbc cdcd ee.
•It was created by Edmund - & used in his rhyme sequence Amoretti.
•Thomas Hardy used it for “Her Reproach”.
Spenserian Sonnet
•A line of poetry that begins & ends w/ the same word.
Serpentine Verse
•A stanza of 6 lines
Hexastitch
•An 8 line stanza.
•Chiefly used to denote the 1st 8 lines of the Italian sonnet & rhyming
abbaabba.
Octave
•The turn in thought that occurs @ the beginning of the sestet in the Italian sonnet.
•Sometimes occurs in the Shakespearean sonnet between the 12th & 13th lines.
•A - is routinely marked by the words “but”, “yet”, or “and yet” @ its beginning.
•The design of Hardy’s “Hap is perspicuous:
Line 1: “If…”
Line 5: “Then…”
Line 9: “But not so…”
Volta
•The six-line division @ Te end of an Italian sonnet, usually rhyming
cde cde or cd cd cd
Sestet
•A 6 line stanza.
Sextain
- The prevailing mood or tone of a literary work; particularly-but nut exclusively- when that mood is established impart by setting or landscape. It is also an emotional aura that helps to establish the reader’s expectations & attitudes.
- Example is the somber mood established by the description of the prison door in the opening chapter of Hawthorne’s -The Scarlet Letter-.
Atmosphere
•A poem related to a country life, customarily having to do w/ young love.
•Anthologies sometimes use this general title for such pieces as “It | |
a Lover & His Lass” from Shakespeare’s -As You Like It-.
•Thomas Hardy’s -Time’s Laughingstocks- (1909) includes 17 poems in a group called “A Set of - -“.
Country Song
•A sonnet combining the rhyme schemes of the English sonnet & the Italian sonnet, most often w/ an octave from the English & a sestet from the Italian.
•Ex: Thomas Hardy’s “Hap”:
{abab cdcd} {efeffe}
Octave Sestet
Anglo-Italian Sonnet
- A prose narrative, usually long & complicated in plot dealing w/ rustic life & often containing interspersed songs.
- Examples exist from classical times through the Renaissance up to elements of - - in such works as Thomas Hardy’s novel -Far From the Madding Crowd-, which contains a shepherd called Gabriel Oak & a few interspersed songs.
Pastoral Romance
•A stanza of 3 lines.
Tristitch
- A figure poem, written so that the form of the printed word suggests the subject matter.
- Ex: bOsOm
Carmen Figuratum
- A long narrative poem in elevated style presenting characters of high position in adventures.
- Heroes important to the history of a nation or race.
- Deeds of great courage.
- Supernatural forces.
- Poet is objective.
Epic
- A song.
* Almost any simple poem intended to be sung.
Chanson
- A poem that tells a story.
* Ex: ballads, epics, metrical romances.
Narrative Poem
•A form of light verse-concerns an actual person whose name makes up the first lines of a quatrain w/ a strict aabb rhyme scheme-but no regular rhythm or meter.
Clerihew
- A song of lamentation.
* A funeral dirge.
Coronach
- A wailing song @ a funeral or in commemoration of death.
* A short lyric of lamentation.
Dirge
- Rude verse.
* Any poorly executed attempt @ poetry.
Doggeral
- A poem->through the speech of a character in a frantic situation.
- Character is speaking to an identifiable but silent listener.
Dramatic Monologue
•A poem expressing grief, more intense & personal than in a complaint.
Lament
•A lyric poem common in the Middle Ages & Renaissance in which the poem laments the unresponsiveness of a mistress, bemoans his unhappy lot in life, or regrets the sorry state of the world.
Complaint
•Any extended fictional narrative, almost always in prose.
Novel
•A term introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin to describe a spirit of - in literature, marked by fun, attention to the body, defiance of authority, variety, Heteroglossia, & play.
Carnivalesque
- A feat of strength or virtuosity.
- In criticism-works that make outstanding demonstrations of skill.
- Most often implies technical virtuosity rather than literary strength.
Tour de Force
- A short novel.
- A work of prose fiction of intermediates length (longer than a short story, shorter than a novel).
- Has the compact structure of the ss, w/ the greater development of characters & action of the novel.
- Ex: Melville’s -Billy Budd-, Stevenson’s -Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde-, James’ -The Turn of the Screw-.
Novelette
•A work issued in installments that end @ a point of great suspense.
Cliffhanger
•A sustained & formal poem setting forth meditation, death or another solemn theme.
Elegy
- A Muslim collection of scriptural writings.
- Believed to have been revealed to Muhammad from time to time over a period of years.
- Presents theology, moral teaching, liturgical directions & advice on religious conduct & ceremonials.
- The speaker is usually God.
Koran
•Thoughts are arranged in an octave & a sestet.
-abbaabba {cdecde}
•Sestet is arranged w/ c, d, & e in any order, but w/o any couplets.
Petrarchan/Italian Sonnet
- A poem consisting of 1 line.
* Ex: A.R. Ammons’ “Coward”
Monostitch
- French verse form.
- Consists of 8 lines, the 1st 2 being repeated as the last 2 & the 1st line recurring also as the 4th.
- Has only 2 rhymes.
- Hard to write.
Triolet
- A poem expressing religious emotion & generally intense to be sung by a Chorus.
- Very important in the Middle Ages.
- Thomas Hardy wrote 2 poems based on Latin -.
Hymn
- A form of light verse that follows a definite pattern: 5 anapestic lines w/ the 1st, 2nd, & 5th consisting of 3 feet & rhyming; the 3rd & 4th lines consisting of 2 feet & rhyming.
- These have been written by the most distinguished modern poets.
- They include every possible theme w/ nothing being sacred to their humor.
Limerick
- Generally, a rationally ordered poem of praise or blame, proceeding detail by detail.
- Specifically, in the form called - du corps feminin, an encomienda for one’s beloved.
- In “Precious Five”, W.H. Auden produced these addressed to the speaker’s own body.
Blason
- Lines in which both the grammatical structure & the sense reach completion.
- Absence of enjambment of run-on lines.
End-stopped Lines
•A word or stem meaning “line”.
Stitch
•A stanza of 6 lines.
Sextain
- Another word for stanza.
- To avoid fuzziness, some writers limit stanza to regular, recurrent, & usually rhymed subdivisions of a poem, leaving this word to cover irregular & unrhymed subdivisions.
Strophe
- A recurrent grouping of 2 or more verse lines in terms of length, metrical form, & rhyme scheme.
- Division into these is sometimes made according to thought as well as form in which case this is a unit like a prose paragraph.
Stanza
- A stanza of 3 lines in which each lines ends w/ the same rhyme.
- Or either of the 2 3-line groups forming the sestet of the Italian sonnet.
- Also applied to the 3-line stanza of terza rima.
Tercet/Terzetta/Terzetto/Triplet/
Terzina
•A group of 8 lines of verse.
Octastitch
- The art & practice of writing verse.
* Ex: accent, rhythm, meter, rhyme, stanza, sound devices, etc.
Versification
- Originally French.
- A fixed 19-line form employing only 2 rhymes & repeating 2 of the lines according to a set pattern. Line 1 is also repeated as lines 6,12, & 18; Line 3 is repeated as lines 9, 15, & 19. The 1st & 3rd lines return as a rhymed couplet @ the end.
- Rhymes aba aba aba aba aba abaa
- Dylon Thomas’ “Do Not So Gentle into That Good Night” is a great modern example.
Villanelle
The principles of versification, particularly as they refer to rhyme, meter, rhythm, & stanza.
Prosody
- A type of music originated in the West Indies. It is a ballad-like improvisation in African rhythms.
- frequently deals satirically w/ current topics.
Calypso
- One of the most difficult &complex verse forms.
- 6 6-lined stanzas & a 3-lined envoy.
- Usually unrhymed, the effect of rhyme being taken over by an intricate, fixed pattern of repeated end-words.
- It has been practiced w/ success by W.H. Auden.
Sestina
- A modification of the rondel.
- A simple poem of about 14 lines in which 1 line frequently recurs Ina refrain.
- May also mean the musical setting of a rondeau so that it may be sung or chanted as an accompaniment for a folk dance.
Roundelay
- A French verse form, a variant of the rondeau.
- Consists of 14 or 13 lines, depending on whether the 2-lines refrain is kept @ the close or simply 1 line.
- Rhymes abba ababab baab
- Repetition of rhyme words is not allowed.
- Differs from rondeau in # of lines & the use if complete (rather than partial) lines for refrain.
- Chaucer sometimes used this as a stanza & not as a poem itself.
Rondel
•A form o poetry having the same form as a haiku, but a different spirit, relying on humor or | | rather than conventions related to certain seasons.
Senryu
- In a broad sense philosophical poetry.
- Commonly applied to the work of the 17th century writers called - Poets who retorted against the conventions of Elizabethan love poetry.
- Their tendency toward psychological analysis of love & religion, their liking of their use of this conceit, & the extremes to which sometimes carried their techniques frequently resulted in obscurity, roughness & strain.
- John Donne was the deknowledged leader.
Metaphysical Poetry
- A decorative art in sculpture, painting, & architecture characterized by fantastic representations of human & animal forms often combined into formal distortions of the natural to the point of absurdity, ugliness, or caricature.
- Anything bizarre, incongruous, ugly, unnatural, fantastic, abnormal.
- Works containing characters who are physically or spiritually deformed or who person abnormal actions.
Grotesque
- A poem of only 1 rhyme.
* Examples are rare.
Monorhyme
- 7-lines iambic pentameter stanza rhyming ababbcc (sometimes the 7th line is hexameter-an Alexandrine).
- Probably named so in honor of King James I.
- The only stanza used by all 3 poets customarily called the greatest in English-Chaucer, Shakespeare, & Milton.
Rhyme Royal
- An extended & rigorous verbal exchange.
* A boasting & insult match in verse.
Flyting
•A song of praise or joy.
Paean
- “Song of great deeds”
* Early French epic.
Roman de Geste
•A set French verse form, artificial but popular w/ many English poets.
•Consists of 15 lines, the 9th & 15th being a short refrain. Only 2 rhymes are allowed, aside from the refrain. The rhyme scheme is
aabba aabc aabbac. The lines most frequently consists of 8 syllables.
Rondeau
- The carrying over of grammatical structure from 1 line to the next.
- The opposite of end-stopped lines.
- Also called enjambment.
Run-on Lines
A short introductory poem @ the beginning of a long poem or a section of a long poem.
Prelude
- The omission of part of a word.
- Most often accompanied by the omission of a final vowel preceding an initial vowel. Ex: “th’ orient”
- Also between syllables of a single word. Ex: “ne’er”
Elision
•Another name for “tail” or a short line found in certain verse forms.
Cauda
•In poetry a variation in the metrical pattern by the substitution of a foot that differs from the basic rhythm of the poem or by the addition or deletion of unstressed syllables.
Modulation
•Omission of material that Amy be necessary for full clarity.
Ex: “A friend in need is a friend indeed.”
Eclipsis
•The omission of 1 or more sounds from a word, as “even” for “evening” or “bod” for “body”.
Apocope
•A stanza of 4 lines.
Quatrain
- The plural of the Arabic word for quatrain, hence a collection of 4-lined stanzas.
- Best known from Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of -The - of Omar Khayyam-.
Rubáiyát
- A section or division of a long poem.
* Originally signified a section of a narrative poem of such length as to be sung by a minstrel in 1 singing.
Canto
•A lyric about dawn or a morning serenade, a song of lovers parting @ dawn.
Aubade
•Medieval, natural, primitive, wild, mystery.
Gothic
