LITERARY TERMS Lecturer: Dr.

Clare Udras

Sources: Chris Baldick, Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Edward Hirsch, The Essential Poet’s Glossary (Mariner Books, 2017)

Poetry: Language sung, chanted, spoken or written according to some pattern of recurrence
that emphasises the relationships between words on the basis of sound as well as sense: this
pattern is almost always a rhythm or metre, which may be supplemented by rhyme or
alliteration or both. The demands of verbal patterning usually make poetry a more condensed
medium that prose of everyday speech, often involving variations in syntax, the use of special
words and phrases peculiar to poets (poetic diction), and a more frequent and more elaborate
use of figures of speech, principally metaphor and simile.

Prose: The form of written language that is not organised according to the formal patterns of
verse; although it will have some sort of rhythm and some devices of repetition and balance,
these are not governed by a regularly sustained formal arrangement, the significant unit
being the sentence rather than the line.

SOME ESSENTIAL TERMS

Close reading: A term commonly applied to the detailed analysis of a literary text, usually a
short poem or prose excerpt. The close reader typically attempts to account for and justify
the presence of all the text’s features of sound and sense, usually detecting sonic
correspondences such as internal rhyme and alliteration along with ambiguities of meaning,
and the complex use of literary devices, all integrated into a formal unity.

Content: The term commonly used to refer to what is said in a literary work, as opposed to
how it is said (that is to form or style). Distinctions between form and content are
necessarily abstractions made for the sake of analysis, since in any actual work there can be
no content that has not in some way been formed, and no purely empty form.

Paraphrase: A restatement of a test’s meaning in different words, usually to clarify the

sense of the original.

Theme: A salient (prominent) abstract idea that emerges from a literary work’s treatment f
its subject-matter; or a topic recurring in a number of literary works. While the subject of a
work is described concretely in terms of its action (e.g. the adventures of a newcomer in the
big city’), its theme or themes will be described in more abstract terms (e.g. love, war,
revenge, betrayal, fate etc.). The theme of a work often emerges indirectly through the
recurrence of motifs.

Motif: A situation, incident, idea, image or character-type that is found in many different
literary works; or any element of a work that is elaborated into a more general theme.
Where an image, incident, or other element is repeated significantly within a single work, it
is more commonly referred to as a leitmotif. One of the motifs in Romeo and Juliet is ‘light
and darkness’. Romeo refers to Juliet as light throughout the play, she is "the sun" and her
eyes are like "two of the fairest stars in all the heaven." Their love is a light that shines
brightest in the darkness, but is ultimately consumed by it. Think of the ‘doubles’,
‘windows’, ‘nature-culture conflict’ in Wuthering Heights – these are all motifs.

Diction: The choice of words used in a literary work. A writer’s diction may be characterized,
for example, by archaism or by Latinate derivations; and it may be described according to
the oppositions formal / colloquial; abstract / concrete; literal / figurative.

Connotation: The range of further associations that a word or phrase suggests in addition to
its straightforward dictionary meaning (the primary sense known as it denotation). A word’s
connotations can usually be formulated as a series of qualities, contexts and emotional
responses commonly associated with its referent (that to which it refers). Which of these
will be activated by the word will depend on the context in which it is used, and to some
degree on the reader or hearer. Metaphors are made possible by the fact that the two
terms they identify both have overlapping connotations. E.g. the word ‘worm’ denotes a
small, slender invertebrate; but its connotation of slow burrowing activity also allows an
ingratiating person to be described metaphorically as ‘worming his way into favour’ while
other connotations based on emotional response (sliminess, insignificance) permit a person
to be described simply as ‘a worm’.

Ambiguity: Openness to different interpretations; or an instance in which some use of

language may be understood in diverse ways. The verbal compression and uncertain context
of poetry often produce ambiguity e.g. In the first line of Keats’s ode on a Grecian Urn:

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness

‘still’ may mean ‘even yet’ or ‘immobile’ or both.

Pun: A form of wordplay, the pun is a figure of speech that depends upon words that have a
similar sound or spelling yet disparate meanings. A good pun releases multiple energies in
words. In Romeo and Juliet (1587), the dying Mercutio declares, ‘Ask for me tomorrow, you
shall find me a grave man’. He thus combines two meanings of the words grace (‘serious,
sombre’ and ‘a place of burial’).
Imagery: A critical term covering those uses of language in a literary work that evoke sense-
impressions by literal or figurative reference to perceptible objects, scenes, actions, or
states, as distinct from the language of abstract argument. The imagery of a literary work
thus comprises the set of images that it uses; these need not be mental ‘pictures’ but many
appeal to sense other than sight. Thus you may notice visual but also tactile, auditory
(aural), gustatory and olfactory imagery. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren defined it
in Understanding Poetry (1938) as: ‘the representation in poetry of any sense experience’.
The term is also often applied particularly to the figurative language used in a work,
especially to its metaphors and similes. Images suggesting further meanings and
associations in ways that go beyond the fairly simple identifications of metaphor and simile
are often called ‘symbols’.

Metaphor: The most important and widespread figure of speech, in which one thing, idea,
or action is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting another thing, idea or
action, so as to suggest some common quality shared by the two. In metaphor, this
resemblance is assumed as an imaginary identity rather than directly stated as a
comparison: referring to a man as ‘that pig’ or saying ‘he is a pig’ is metaphorical, whereas
he is like a pig is a simile. Metaphors may also appear as verbs (a talent may ‘blossom’) or as
adjectives (a novice may be ‘green’), or in longer idiomatic phrases e.g. to throw the baby
out of with the bathwater’. The use of metaphor to create new combinations of ideas is a
major feature of poetry, although it is quite possible to write poems without metaphors. A
mixed metaphor is one in which the combination of qualities suggested is illogical or
ridiculous, usually as a result of trying to apply two metaphors to one thing: those vipers
stabbed us in the back. Modern analysis of metaphors and similes distinguishes the primary
literary term (called the ‘tenor’) from the secondary figurative term (the ‘vehicle’) applied to
it: in the metaphor ‘the road of life’, the tenor is life, and the vehicle is the road.

Simile: The explicit comparison of one thing to another, using the word ‘as’ or ‘like’ – as
when Robert Burns writes:
My love is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
My love is like the melodie
That’s sweetly play’d in tune.
The essence of a simile is likeness and unlikeness, urging a comparison of two different
things. Whereas metaphor asserts an identity (e.g. Poetry is a meteor (Wallace Stevens))
and says A equals B, the simile is a form of analogical (relational) thinking.

Metonymy: A figure of speech that replaces the name of one thing with the name of
something else closely associated with it e.g. the bottle for alcoholic drink, the press for
journalism, Mozart for Mozart’s music. A well-known metonymic saying is the pen is
mightier than the sword (i.e. writing is more powerful than warfare). A word used in such
metonymic expression is sometimes called a metonym. An important kind of metonymy is
synecdoche, in which the name of a part is substituted for that of a whole (e.g. hand for
worker).
Personification: A figure of speech by which animals, abstract ideas or inanimate things are
referred to as if they were human. E.g. ‘Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade’
(Shakespeare).

Onomatopoeia: The use of words that seem to imitate the sounds they refer to e.g. crash,
growl, hum, buzz, purr, whine; or any combination of words in which the sound gives the
impression of echoing the sense. This figure of speech is often found in poetry, sometimes
in prose. Adjective: onomatopoeic.

Consonance: The repetition of identical or similar consonants in neighbouring words whose

vowel sounds are different. Whereas alliteration repeats the first letter of a word,
consonance repeats sounds within a word. Listen to the sounds ‘f’ and ‘l’ woven through
these lines from Wilfred Owen’s World War I poem ‘Insensibility’:

The front line withers,

But they are troops who fade, not flowers
For poet’ tearful fooling:
Men, gaps for filling:
Losses, who might have fought
Longer; but no one bothers.

The term ‘consonance’ is also commonly used for a special case of consonantal repetition in
which the words are identical except for the stressed vowel sound e.g. group / grope,
middle / muddle, wonder / wander. This device, combining alliteration and terminal
consonance, is sometimes known more precisely as ‘rich consonance’ and since around
1920 has frequently been used at the ends of verse lines as an alternative to full rhyme.

Alliteration: The audible repetition of the same sounds – usually initial consonants of words
or of stressed syllables – in any sequence of neighbouring words. E.g. ‘Landscape-lover, lord
of language’ (Tennyson). Alliteration is part of the sound stratum of poetry – a device of
phonic echoes and linked initial sounds.

Cacophony: Harsh, jarring discordant sounds, often the result of repetition and combination
of consonants within a group of words. The opposite of euphony. (Adjective: cacophonous).
Writers frequently use cacophony to express energy or mimic mood. Usually a result of
awkward alliteration, as in tongue-twisters, it is sometimes used by poets for deliberate
effect, as in these lines from Robert Browning’s ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’:

And squared and stuck there squares of soft white chalk,

And with a fish-tooth, scratched a moon on each,
And set up endwise certain spikes of tree,
And crowned the whole with a sloth’s skull a-top.

The term dissonance is also used to refer to harshness or sound and / or rhythm.
‘Dissonance’ tends to denote a lack of harmony between sounds rather than the harshness
of a particular sound in isolation.
Euphony: A pleasing smoothness of sound, perceived by the ease with which words can be
spoken in combination. The use of long vowels, liquid consonants (l,r) and semi-vowels (w,y)
contributes to euphony, along with the avoidance of adjacent stresses. The meaning of the
words has an important effect too. The opposite of cacophony. Adjective: euphonious.

Sibilance: The marked recurrence of the ‘hissing’ sounds known as sibilants (usually spelt s,
sh, zh, c). The effect is often exploited in poetry, as in Longfellow’s lines:
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness.

Assonance: The repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds in the stressed syllables (and
sometimes in the following unstressed syllables) of neighbouring words. It is distinct from
rhyme in that the consonants differ although the vowels match: ‘sweet dreams’, ‘hit or
miss.’ John Keats’s theory was that ‘the vowels should be so managed as not to clash with
one another so as to mar the melody, - and yet that they should be interchanged, like
differing notes of music’. Assonance is a key aural device in poetry.

Repetition: The use of the same term several times. It is one of the most marked features of
all poetry, oral and written. Meaning accrues through repetition. One of the deep
fundamentals of poetry is the recurrence of sounds, syllables, words, phrases, lines and
stanzas. Repetition creates expectations, which can be fulfilled or frustrated, It can creates a
sense of boredom or incite enchantment and inspire bliss (think of spells and chants,
children’s rhymes and lullabies). Many of the sound devices of poetry (alliteration,
assonance, consonance) depend on recurrence. Metrical patterns are also established by
recurrences.

Anaphora: Often used in political speeches and occasionally in prose and poetry, anaphora
is the repetition of a word or words at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or lines
to create a sonic effect. Dr Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which
uses anaphora not only in its oft-quoted “I have a dream” refrain but throughout, as in this
passage when he repeats the phrase “go back to”:

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina,

go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and
ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can
and will be changed.
Anaphora is an essential part of Walt Whitman’s ecstatic iterations in his collection Leaves
of Grass (1855): e.g.
For I too raising my voice join the ranks of this pageant,
I am the chanter, I chant aloud over the pageant,
I chant the world on my Western sea,
I chant copious the islands beyond, thick as stars in the sky,
I chant the new empire grander than any before, as in a vision it
comes to me,
I chant America the mistress, I chant a greater supremacy,
 I chant projected a thousand blooming cities yet in time on those
groups of sea-islands,
My sail-ships and steam-ships threading the archipelagoes,
My stars and stripes fluttering in the wind …

The counterpart of anaphora is epiphora or epistrophe: the repetition of a word of phrase

at the end of successive clauses, sentences or lines.

Parallelism: The arrangement of similarly constructed clauses, sentences or verse lines in a

paring or other sequence suggesting some correspondence between them. The effect of
parallelism is usually one of balanced arrangement achieved through repetition of the same
syntactic form. These lines from Shakespeare’s Richard II show parallelism:
I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads,
My gorgeous place for a hermitage,
My gay apparel fro an almsman’s gown,
My figured goblets for a dish of wood …

Antithesis: A contrast or opposition. A disposition of words that serves to emphasise a

contrast or opposition of ideas, usually by the balancing of connected clauses with parallel
grammatical constructions. In Milton’s paradise Lost (1667), the characteristics of Adam and
Eve are contrasted by antithesis:
For contemplation he and valour formed,
For softness she and sweet attractive grace […]

Paradox: A statement or expression so surprisingly self-contradictory as to provoke us into

seeking another sense or context in which it would be true. Wordsworth’s line ‘the Child is
father of the Man’ is a notable literary example. It may be considered a mode of
understanding by which poetry challenges our habits of thought.

Oxymoron: A figure of speech that combines two usually contradictory terms in a

compressed paradox, as in the word bittersweet or the phrase living death or Milton’s
description of Hell as ‘darkness visible’. Shakespeare has his Romeo utter several in one
speech:
Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,
O anything of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!

Hyperbole: Exaggeration for the sake of emphasis in a figure of speech not meant literally.
An everyday example is the complaint ‘I’ve been waiting here for ages’. E.g. In
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra praises the dead Antony:

His legs bestrid the ocean: his reared arm

Crested the world.
Apostrophe: An address to a dead or absent person, or an abstraction or inanimate object.
In his Holy Sonnet “Death, be not proud,” John Donne denies death’s power by directly
admonishing it. One of the distinctive marks of poetry is that it can address anything:
Geoffrey Chaucer playfully addresses his purse in ‘The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse’
(c.1399), while William Blake cries out ‘O Rose thou art sick’ (The Sick Rose, 1794).

Inversion: The reversal of the normally expected order of words. Inversion of word order
(syntax), also known as hyperbaton, is a common form of poetic licence allowing a poet to
preserve the rhyme scheme or the metre of a verse line, or to place special emphasis on
particular words. Common forms of inversion in English are the placing of an adjective after
its noun (his fiddlers three), the placing of the grammatical subject after the verb (said she),
and the placing of an adverb or adverbial phrase before its verb (sweetly blew the breeze).

Stanza: The natural unit of the lyric: a group or sequence of lines arranged in a pattern. A
stanzaic pattern is traditionally defined by the metre and rhyme scheme, considered
repeatable throughout the work. The word stanza means ‘room’ in Italian – a station, a
stopping place – and each stanza in a poem is like a room in a house, a lyric dwelling place.
The Italian etymology implies that stanzas are subordinate units within the more
comprehensive unity of the whole poem. Each stanza has an identity, a structural place in
the whole. As the line is a single unit of meaning, so the stanza comprises a larger rhythmic
and thematic sequence. It is a basic division comparable to the paragraph in prose, but
more insistent as a separate melodic unit. In printed poems, stanzas are separated by
spaces. The term is most often applied to groups of four lines or more, the four-line quatrain
being by far the most common. In many poems which are divided up irregularly (e.g. those
written in blank verse or free verse), the sections are sometimes called verse paragraphs.

End-stopped line: A poetic line in which a natural grammatical pause, such as that occurring
at the end of a phrase, clause or sentence, coincides with the end of a line. End-stopping,
the opposite of enjambment, gives verse lines an appearance of self-contained sense and
completeness, though that feeling is temporary, since the poem then proceeds onward until
its end. The halting effect is increased when each end-stopped line concludes with an
emphatic punctuation mark, as in the first eight lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sonnet
‘The Starlight Night (1877):
Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.
Enjambment: The running over of the sense and grammatical structure from one verse line
or couplet to the next without a punctuated pause. In an enjambed line (also called a run-on
line), the completion of a phrase, clause or sentence is held over to the following line so that
the line ending is not emphasised as it is in an end-stopped line. Enjambement is one of the
resources available to poets in English blank verse, but it appears in other verse forms too,
even in heroic couplets. Keats rejected the 18th Century closed couplet by using frequent
enjambment in ‘Endymion’ (1818):
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Rhyme: The identity of sound between syllables or paired groups of syllables, usually at the
ends of verse lines. Normally the last stressed vowel in the line and all sounds following it
make up the rhyming elements: this may be a monosyllable (love / above – known as
masculine rhyme) or two syllables (whether / together – known as ‘feminine rhyme’ or
‘double rhyme’) or even three syllables (glamorous / amorous – known as ‘triple rhyme’)/
Where a rhyming element in a feminine or triple rhyme uses more than one word (famous /
shame us), this is known as mosaic rhyme. The examples given so far all illustrate ‘full
rhyme’ (also known as ‘perfect rhyme’ or ‘true rhyme’). Departures from this norm take four
main forms: a. rime riche, in which the consonants preceding the rhyming elements are also
identical, even if the spellings and meanings of the words differ (made/maid); b. eye rhyme,
in which the spellings of the rhyming elements match, but the sounds do not (love / prove);
c. half-rhyme or slant rhyme, where the vowel sounds do not match (love/have); d.
pararhyme: half-rhyme with additional rich consonance (love/leave). Although rhyme is
most often used at the ends of verse lines, internal rhyme between syllables within the
same line is also found. Rhyme is not essential to poetry.

Rhyme scheme: The pattern in which the rhymed line-endings are arranged in a poem or
stanza. This may be expressed as a sequence of recurrences in which each line ending on
the same rhyme is given the same alphabetic symbol e.g. the rhyme scheme of a limerick is
aabba:
There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.

Rhyme schemes may follow a fixed pattern, as in the sonnet and many other forms, or they
may be arranged freely according to the poet’s requirements. The simplest rhyme schemes
are those of rhyming couplets (aabbcc etc.) and of the common quatrain forms (abab, abcb,
abba), while others such as the Spenserian stanza (ababbcbcc), are much more intricate.
Rhythm: The pattern of sounds perceived as the recurrence of equivalent ‘beats’ at more or
less equal intervals. In most English poetry, an underlying rhythm is manifested in a metrical
pattern (see Metre) – a sequence of measured beats and ‘offbeats’ arranged in verse lines.
Rhythm is a less structured principle than metre: one can refer to the unmeasured rhythms
of everyday speech, or of prose or free verse.

Persona: The assumed identity or fictional ‘I’ (literally a ‘mask’) assumed by a writer in a
literary work; thus the speaker in lyric poem, or the narrator in a fictional narrative. In a
dramatic monologue, the speaker is evidently not the real author but an invented or
historical character. May modern critics, though, insist that the speaker in any poem should
be referred to as the persona, to avoid the unreliable assumption that we are listening to
the true voice of the poet. One reason for this is that a given poet may write different
poems in which the speakers are of distinct kinds: another is that our identification of the
speaking voce with that of the real poet would confuse imaginative composition with
autobiography.
Caesura: A stop or pause in a metrical line, often marked by punctuation or by a
grammatical boundary, such as a phrase or clause. A medial caesura splits the line in equal
parts, as is common in Old English poetry (such as Beowulf). Medial caesurae (plural of
caesura) can be found throughout contemporary poet Derek Walcott’s ‘The Bounty’:

The lizard on the white wall fixed on the hieroglyph

of its stone shadow, the palms’ rustling archery,
the souls and sails of circling gulls rhyme with:

“In la sua volont è nostra pace,”

In His will is our peace. Peace in white harbours,
in marinas whose masts agree, in crescent melons

left all night in the fridge, in the Egyptian labours

of ants moving boulders of sugar, words in this sentence,
shadow and light, who live next door like neighbours,

and in sardines with pepper sauce.

Colloquialism: The use of informal expressions appropriate to everyday speech rather than
to the formality of writing, and differing in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar.

Tone: A critical term usually taken to indicate a writer’s or speaker’s sense of a given
situation. The tone is in the inflection, how a thing is said, or seems to be said. The literary
term ‘tone’ is borrowed from the expression ‘tone of voice’ and thus implies something
spoken aloud. Whenever a poem makes us conscious of someone speaking, tone is a
relevant conception. Responding to tone includes determining a speaker’s attitude toward
her subject (what she is addressing) as well as toward her audience (whom she is
addressing). In oral poetry, the listener responds to the intonations of spoken words. In
written poetry, spoken intonations must be inferred by readers; they hear the tones with an
inner ear. The tonal range is vast and sometimes difficult to determine – is it aggrieved,
beseeching, curious, determined, aggressive, elevated, furious, grim, happy, ironic, or many
of these things at once? A poem often shifts and develops a variety of shadings over the
course of its movements from beginning to end. How would you describe the tone in these
lines by Milton?
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine Mountains cold.
WORKING WITH LITERARY TERMS:

Example 1:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills. (William Wordsworth)

Example 2:

How long have they tugged the leash, and strained apart,
My pack of unruly hounds! I cannot start
Them again on a quarry of knowledge they hate to hunt,
I can haul them and urge them no more. (D.H. Lawrence, ‘First Lesson in the Afternoon’)

Example 3:

Busy old fool, unruly sun,

Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run? (John Donne)

Example 4:

And thud! Flump! Thud! Down the steep steps came thumping
And sploshing in the flood, deluging much –
The sentry’s body. (Wilfred Owen)

Example 5:

On the bald street breaks the blank day (Tennyson)

Example 6:

O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being (Shelley)

Example 7:

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight (Dylan Thomas)

Example 8:

So from a battle, I learnt this healing peace (Elizabeth Jennings)

Example 9:

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me (Thomas Hardy)
Example 10:

There's a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –

We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are
[…] (Emily Dickinson)

Example 11:

In every cry of every Man,

In every infant’s cry of fear
In every voice: in every ban.
The mind-forged manacles I hear (William Blake)

Example 12:

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,

Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes;
Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies. (Tennyson)

Example 13:

I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest (Andrew Marvell)

Example 14:

With jellies soother than the cream curd,

And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon (John Keats)
MORE CRITICAL TERMS

Amphibrach: A classical metrical foot consisting of one long syllable enclosed by two short
ones. The pronunciation of a word like ‘remember’ approximates the effect.

Anapaest: A metrical foot made up of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed

syllable, as in the word ‘interrupt’. Originally a Greek marching beat, adopted by some
Greek or Roman dramatists, the rising rhythm of anapaestic verse has sometimes been used
by poets in English to echo energetic movements, notably in Robert browning’s ‘How they
Brought the News for Ghent to Aix’ (1845):

Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace

Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place.

Anticlimax: An abrupt lapse from growing intensity to triviality in a passage of dramatic,

narrative, or descriptive writing, with the effect of disappointed expectation or deflated
suspense. Anticlimactic descent from the sublime to the ludicrous can also be used
deliberately for comic effect. Byron employs comic anti-climax repeatedly in Don Juan
(1816), as in these lines which describe the survivors of a shipwreck:
Though every wave roll’d menacingly to fill,
And present peril all before surpass’d
They grieved for those who perished with the cutter
And also for the biscuit-casks and butter.

Aposiopesis: A rhetorical device in which the speaker suddenly breaks off in the middle of a
sentence leaving the sense unfinished. The device usually suggests strong emotion that
makes the speaker unwilling or unable to continue. E.g. Shakespeare’s King Lear’s unfinished
outburst:
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall –

Ballad: A folk song or orally transmitted poem telling in a direct and dramatic manner some
popular story usually derived from a tragic incident in local history or legend. The story is
told simple, impersonally, usually with vivid dialogue. Ballads are normally composed in
quatrains with alternating four-stress and three-stress lines (ballad stanza), the second and
fourth lines rhyming. Some are in couplet form, and others have six-line stanzas.

Biography: A narrative history of the life of some person. Biography has a number of
subgenres, of which the most important is autobiography, in which the subject and the
author are the same person.

Blank verse: Unrhyming iambic pentameter, also called heroic verse. This 10-syllable line is
the predominant rhythm of traditional English dramatic and epic poetry, as it is considered
the closest to English speech patterns. It is a very flexible English verse form which can
attain rhetorical grandeur while echoing the natural rhythms of speech and allowing smooth
enjambment. Much of the finest verse in English – by Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth,
Tennyson and Stevens – has been written in blank verse.

For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being. (Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’)

Characterization: The representation of persons in narrative and dramatic works. This may
include direct methods like the attribution of qualities in description or commentary, and
indirect (or ‘dramatic’) methods inviting readers to infer qualities from characters’ actions,
speech or appearance.

Couplet: A pair of rhyming verse lines, usually of the same length; one of the most widely
used verse forms in European poetry. We call a couplet closed when the sense and syntax
come to a conclusion or a strong pause at the end of the second line, thus giving a feeling of
self-containment and enclosure, as in the first lines of Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy
Mistress’:
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.

Dactyl: A metrical unit (foot) of verse, having one stressed syllable followed by two
unstressed syllables, as in the world ‘carefully’. Dactylic verse is rare in English. Tennyson’s
‘the charge of the Light Brigade uses it, as does Thomas Hardy’s The Voice’ which begins:
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me.
Device: An all-purpose term used to describe any literary technique deliberately employed
to achieve a specific effect.

Didactic: Instructive; designed to impart information, advice or some doctrine of morality or

philosophy.

Dramatic Monologue: A kind of poem in which a single fictional or historical character other
than the poet speaks to a silent ‘ audience’ of one or more persons. Such poems reveal not
the poet’s own thoughts but the mind of the impersonated character, whose personality is
revealed unwittingly; this distinguishes a dramatic monologue from a lyric, while the implied
presence of a listener distinguishes it from a soliloquy. E.g. Robert Browning’s ‘My Last
Duchess’ and ‘Porphyria’s Lover’.

Ekphrasis: A verbal description of, or meditation upon, a non-verbal work of art, real or
imagined, usually a painting or sculpture. E.g. W. H. Auden’s ‘‘Musee de Beaux Arts’ (1939)
and Keats’s’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1820).

Elegy: An elaborately formal lyric poem lamenting the death of a friend or public figure.
Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ (1850) is a long series of elegiac verses on his friend
Arthur Hallam.

End-rhyme: The most familiar kind of rhyming. Rhyme occurring at the ends of verse lines,
as opposed to internal rhyme.

Epithet: An adjective or adjectival phrase used to define a characteristic quality or attribute

of some person or thing. In the transferred epithet, an adjective appropriate to one noun is
attached to another by association: thus, in the phrase ‘sick room’ it is not the room that is
sick but the person in it.

Epizeuxis: A rhetorical figure by which a word is repeated for emphasis, with no other words
intervening:
Break, break, break,
On thy cold grey stones, O Sea! (Tennyson)

Eye-rhyme: A kind of rhyme in which the spellings of paired words appear to match but
without true correspondence in pronunciation: dive / give, said / maid.

Feminine ending: The ending of a metrical verse line on an unstressed syllable, as in the
regular trochaic line. In English iambic pentameters, a feminine ending involves the addition
of an eleventh syllable, as in Shakespeare’s famous line:
To be or not to be: that is the question

Figure (of speech): An expression that departs from the accepted literal sense of from the
normal order or words, or in which an emphasis is produced by patterns of sound. In other
words, figures of speeches rely on implied or suggested meaning, rather than a dictionary
definition. Such figurative language is an especially important resource of poetry, although
it is present in all other kinds of speech and writing even though it usually passes unnoticed.
Some examples are proverbs, metaphors, similes, metonymy, irony …

First-person narrative: A narrative or mode of storytelling in which the narrator appears as

the ‘ I’ recollecting his or her own part in the events related, wither as a witness of the
action or as an important participant in it.

Fixed forms: The general term convering the various kidns of poem in which the metre and
rhyme scheme are governed by a prescribed pattern. E.g. the sonnet, the villanelle, the
haiku, the limerick, the ballad.

Focalisation: The term used in modern narratology (the branch of literary study devoted to
the study of narratives) for ‘point of view’; that is, for the kind of perspective from which the
events of a story are witnessed. Events observed by a traditional omniscient narrator are
said to be non-focalised, whereas events witnessed within the story’s world from the
constrained perspective of a single character, the focaliser, are internally focalised.

Foot: The basic unit of measurement of poetic metre. A foot usually contains one stressed
syllable and at least one unstressed syllable. The standard types of feet in English poetry are
the iamb, trochee, dactyl, anapaest and spondee. Here is Coleridge’s witty illustrative poem
‘Metrical Feet’ (c. 1806):
Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot! Yet ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long;—
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapaests throng.

Form: A critical term with a variety of meanings. When speaking of a work’s formal
properties, critics usually refer to its structural design and patterning, or sometimes to its
style and manner in a wider sense, as distinct from its content.

Free indirect style / Free indirect discourse: A manner of presenting the thoughts or
utterances of a fictional character as if from that character’s point of view by combining
grammatical and other features of the character’s ‘direct speech’ with features of the
narrator’s indirect report. Direct discourse is used in the sentence: ‘She thought, ‘I will stay
here tomorrow’, while the equivalent in indirect discourse would be ‘She thought that she
would stay there the next day’. Free indirect style, however, combines the persona and
tense of indirect discourse (‘she would stay’) with the indications of time and place
appropriate to direct discourse (‘here tomorrow’), to form a different kind of sentence: ‘She
would stay here tomorrow’. This form of statement allows a third-person narrative to
exploit a first-person point of view, often with a subtle effect of irony, as in the novels of
Jane Austen.
Free verse: Non-metrical, non-rhyming lines that closely follow the natural rhythms of
speech. A regular pattern of sound or rhythm may emerge in free-verse lines, but the poet
does not adhere to a metrical plan in their composition. Instead of a regular metrical
pattern it uses more flexible cadences or rhythmic groupings, sometimes supported by
anaphora and other devices of repetition. Walt Whitman, who hungered for a line large
enough to express the totality of life, explored the possibilities of non-metrical American
poetry in the 19th century. E.g.
My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,
With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds
Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself …
Free verse should not be confused with blank verse which does observe a regular metre in
its unrhymed lines.

Half-rhyme: An imperfect rhyme (also known by other names including near rhyme and
slant rhyme) in which the final consonants of stressed syllables agree but the vowel sounds
do not match; thus a form on consonance (cape / deep).

Heroic Couplet: A rhymed pair of iambic pentameter lines. E.g.:

Let Observation with extensive View

Survey Mankind, from China to Peru (Johnson)

Homonym: A word that is identical in from with another word, either in sound (as in
homophone) or in spelling (as a homograph) or in both but differs from it in meaning e.g.
days/ daze; made / maid. Identity of form between two or more words is known as
homonymy. Homophony is often exploited in puns.

Iamb: A metrical unit (foot) of verse, having one unstressed syllable followed bvy one
stressed syllable - as in the word ‘beyond’. Iambic verse, lines of poetry made up
predominantly of iambs, is by far the most common kind of metrical verse in English. Its
most important form is the 10-syllable iambic pentameter, wither rhymed, as in heroic
couplets, sonnets etc.) or unrhymed in blank verse. The iambic pentameter permits some
variation in the placing of its five stresses; thus it may often begin with a stressed syllable
followed by an unstressed syllable (a reversal called trochaic inversion or substitution)
before resuming the regular iambic pattern:
Oft she rejects, but never once offends (Pope)
The 8-syllable iambic tetrameter is another common English line:
Come live with me, and be my love (Marlowe).

In Memoriam stanza: This stanza – a quatrain in iambic tetrameter (ta TUM / ta TUM / ta
TUM / ta TUM) with a rhyme scheme of abba – is named for the pattern Tennyson used in
his poem In Memoriam (1849) dealing with the death of his friend Arthur Hallam. Tennyson
thus turned it into one of the most ingenious elegiac devices of 19th Century poetry.

Interior monologue: The written representation of a character’s inner thoughts,

impressions, and memories as if directly ‘overheard’ without the apparent intervention of a
summarising and selecting narrator. The term is sometimes loosely used as a synonym for
stream of consciousness.

Internal rhyme: A poetic device by which two or more words rhyme within the same line of
verse.

Intrusive narrator: An omniscient narrator who, in addition to reporting the events of a

novel’s story, offers further comments on characters and events, and who sometimes
reflects more generally upon the significance of the story. A device used frequently by the
great realist novelists of the 19th Century, notably George Eliot, the intrusive narrator allows
the novel to be used for general moral commentary on human life.

Irony: As a literary device, irony implies a distance between what is said and what is meant.
Based on the context, the reader is able to see the implied meaning in spite of the
contradiction. When William Shakespeare relates in detail how his lover suffers in
comparison with the beauty of nature in “My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing like the Sun,” it is
understood that he is elevating her beyond these comparisons; considering her essence as a
whole, and what she means to the speaker, she is more beautiful than nature.
Dramatic or situational irony involves a contrast between reality and a character’s intention
or ideals. For example, in Sophocles’ Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, King Oedipus searches for
his father’s murderer, not knowing that he himself is that man. In “The Convergence of the
Twain,” Thomas Hardy contrasts the majesty and beauty of the ocean liner Titanic with its
tragic fate and new ocean-bottom inhabitants:

Over the mirrors meant

To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls — grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

Litotes: A figure of speech by which an affirmation is made directly by denying its opposite,
usually with an effect of understatement e.g. no mean feat, not averse to a drink. E.g
Wordsworth often uses the phrase ‘not seldom’ to mean ‘fairly often’ in his
autobiographical poem The Prelude (1850).

Lyric: In ancient Greece, a lyric was a song for accompaniment on a lyre/ In the modern
sense, a lyric is any fairly short poem expressing the personal mood, feeling, or meditation
of a single speaker (who may sometimes be an invented character, not the poet). Lyrics may
be composed in almost any metre and on almost any subject, although the common
emotions presented are those of love and grief. Among the common lyric forms are the
sonnet, ode, elegy, haiku, and the more personal kinds of hymn. Lyricism is the emotional or
song-like quality, of lyric poetry.

Masculine ending: The ending of a metrical verse line on a stressed syllable, as in Emily
Bronte’s regular iambic line:
And who can fight against despair?
Masculine endings are also common in trochaic verse, where the final unstressed syllable
expected in the regular pattern is frequently abandoned. A masculine caesura is one that
immediately follows a stressed syllable, usually in the middle of a line.
Masculine rhyme: The commonest kind of rhyme, between single stressed syllables (e.g.
delay / stay) at the ends of verse lines. In contrast with feminine rhyme, which adds further
unstressed syllables after the rhyming stressed syllables, masculine rhyme matches only the
final syllable with its equivalent in the paired line, as in Christina Rossetti’s couplet:
And all the rest forget,
But one remembers yet.

Metre: The pattern of measured sound-units recurring more or less regularly in lines of
verse, metre is a way of keeping time, of measuring poetic language. The first pleasures of
metre are physical and connected to bodily experience – to the heartbeat and the pulse, to
breathing, walking, running, dancing, working … The metre of a poem can slow us down or
speed us up; it can focus our attention; it can hypnotise us. A rhythmic pattern is something
you observe but also something you can experience. Accentual-syllabic metre is found in
most English verse in the literary tradition since Chaucer. In accentual-syllabic metre, the
pattern consists of a regular number of stressed syllables appropriately arranged within a
fixed total number of syllables in the line (with some permissible variations), but stressed
and unstressed syllables being counted. There are two groups of metres: in duple metres,
stressed syllables alternate more or less regularly with single unstressed syllables, and so
the line is traditionally described as a sequence of 2-syllable (disyllabic) feet; in triple
metres, stressed syllables alternate with pairs of unstressed syllables and the line is seen as
a sequence of 3-syllable (trisyllabic) feet. Of the duple metres, the most common in English
is the iambic metre, in which the stressed syllables are for the most part perceived as
following the unstressed syllables with which they alternate. The triple metres (dactylic and
anapaestic) are less common, but are sometimes found. Dactylic and anapaestic verse is not
usually composed purely of dactyls and anapaests, however; other feet or additional
syllables are frequently combined with or substituted for them. The detailed analysis of
metrical pattern in lines of verse is called scansion.

Narrator: One who tells, or is assumed to be telling, the story in a given narrative. In analysis
of fictional narratives, the narrator is the imagined ‘voice’ transmitting the story, and is
distinguished from the author. Narrators vary according to their degree of participation in
the story: in first-person narratives they are involved either as witnesses or as participants in
the events of the story, whereas in third-person narratives they stand outside those events;
an omniscient (‘all knowing’) narrator stands outside the events by has special privileges
such as access to the characters’ unspoken thoughts, and knowledge of events happening
simultaneously in different places. Further distinctions are made between reliable narrators,
whose accounts of events we are obliged to trust, and unreliable narrators, whose accounts
may be partial, ill-informed or otherwise misleading: most third-person narrators are
reliable, but some first-person narrators are unreliable.

Octave: a group of eight verse lines forming the first part of a sonnet in its Italian
(Petrarchan) form; or a stanza of eight lines. In the first and most frequently used sense, an
octave usually rhymes abbaabba.
Ode: An elaborately formal lyric poem, often in the form of a lengthy ceremonious address
to a person or abstract entity always serious and elevated in tone. Odes in which the same
form of stanza is repeated regularly are called Horatian odes: in English, these include the
odes of John Keats, notable ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.

Pararhyme: A rhyming effect produced by rich consonance without assonance: thus the
consonantal sounds before and after the stressed vowels of a rhyming pair are matched
while the vowel sounds are not e.g. love / leave. This unusual variety of half-rhyme is found
in various traditions of poetry, but in English it was re-invented in 1917 by Wilfred Owen for
some of his war poems, notably ‘Strange Meeting’ (1918).

Pathetic fallacy: The poetic convention whereby natural phenomena which cannot feel as
humans do are described as if they could: thus rain-clouds may ‘weep’, or flowers may be
‘joyful’ in sympathy with the poet’s or imagined speaker’s mood.

Pathos: The emotionally moving quality or power of a literary work or of particular passages
within it, appealing especially to our feelings of sorrow pity and compassionate sympathy.

Pentameter: A metrical verse line having five main stresses, traditionally described as a line
of five ‘feet’. In English poetry, the pentameter has special status as the standard line in
many important forms including blank verse, the heroi couplet, and the sonnet. In its pure
iambic form, the pentameter shows a regular alternation of stressed and unstressed
syllables, as in the line by P.B. Shelley:
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
There are however, several permissible variations in the placing of stresses, which help to
avoid the monotony of such regular alternation, and the pentameter may be lengthened
from 10 syllables to 11 by a feminine ending.

Periphrasis: A roundabout way of referring to something by means of several words instead

of naming it directly in a single word or phrase. Commonly known as circumlocution,
periphrasis is often used in euphemisms like ‘passed away’ for ‘died’.

Petrarchan sonnet: Derived from the work of the major Italian poet Petrarch (Francesco
Petrarca 1304-74), the Petrarchan sonnet, also known as the Italian sonnet, is divided into
an octave rhyming abbaabba and a sestet usually rhyming cdecde, and thus avoids the final
couplet found in the English sonnet.

Plot: The pattern of events and situations in a narrative or dramatic work, as selected and
arranged both to emphasise relationships – usually of cause and effect – between incidents
and to elicit a particular kind of interest in the reader or audience, such as surprise or
suspense. Although in a loose sense the term commonly refers to that sequence of chief
events which can be summarised from a story or play, modern criticism often makes a
stricter distinction between the plot of a work and its story: the plot is the selected version
of events as presented to the reader or audience in a certain order and duration, whereas
the story is the full sequence of events as we imagine them to have taken place in their
‘natural’ order and duration. The story, then, is the hypothetical raw material of events
which we reconstruct from the finished product of the plot.

Point of view: The position or vantage-point from which the events of a story seem to be
observed and presented to us. The chief distinction usually made between points of view is
that between third-person narratives and first-person narratives. A third-person narrator
may be omniscient and therefore show an unrestricted knowledge of the story’s events
from outside or ‘above’ them; but another kind of third-person narrator may confine our
knowledge of events to whatever is observed by a single character or small group of
characters, this method being known as ‘limited point of view (see Focalisation). Many
modern authors have also used ‘multiple point of view’, in which we are shown the events
from the positions of two or more different characters.

Protagonist: The chief character in a play or story, who may be opposed by an antagonist.

Quatrain: A verse stanza of four lines, rhymed or (less often) unrhymed, The quatrain is the
most commonly used stanza in English and most modern European languages. Most ballads
and many hymns are composed in quatrains in which the second and fourth lines rhyme
(abcb or abab). A different rhyme scheme (abba) is used in the In Memoriam stanza and
some other forms. The rhyming four-line groups that makes up the first twelve lines of an
English sonnet are also known as quatrains.

Refrain: A line, group of lines, or part of a line repeated at regular or irregular intervals in a
poem, usually at the end of each stanza. It may recur in exactly the same form, or may be
subject to slight variations. It may form part of a stanza as in the villanelle, or it may appear
separately as in many songs or ballads.

Satire: A mode of writing that exposes the failings of individuals, institutions or societies to
ridicule and scorn. Satire is often an incidental element in literary works that may not be
wholly satirical, especially in comedy.

Scansion: The analysis of poetic metre in verse lines, by displaying stresses, pauses and
rhyme patterns with conventional visual symbols. The simplest system, known as graphic
scansion, marks stressed syllables ( or ), unstressed syllables ( or ), division between
metrical units or ‘feet’ ( ) and major pauses or caesuras ( ) in a verse line, determining
whether its metre is for example, iambic or dactylic, and how many feet make up the line.

Septet: A stanza of seven lines.

Sestet: A group of six verse lines forming the second part of a sonnet (in its Italian or
Petrarchan form), following the opening octave. More rarely, the term may refer to a stanza
of six lines (also called a sestain or sextet)

Sonnet: A short lyric poem, usually comprising 14 rhyming lines of equal length: iambic
pentameters in English. The rhyme schemes of the sonnet follow two basic patterns: 1. The
Italian sonnet (also called the Petrarchan sonnet) comprises an 8-line ‘octave’ rhymed
abbaabba, followed by a 6-line ‘sestet’ usually rhymed cdecde or cdcdcd. The transition
from octave to sestet usually coincides with a ‘turn’ (‘volta’) in the argument or mood of the
poem. In a variant from used by the poet John Milton, however, the ‘turn’ is delayed to a
later position around the tenth line. Some later poets – notably William Wordsworth – have
employed this feature while relaxing the rhyme scheme of the octave to abbaacca. 2. The
English sonnet (also called the Shakespearean sonnet) comprises three quatrains and a final
couplet rhyming ababcdcdefefgg. An important variant of this is the Spenserian sonnet
(introduced by the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser), which links the three quatrains by
rhyme, in the sequence ababbabccdcdee. In either form, the ‘turn’ comes with the final
couplet.

Spondee: A metrical unit (foot) consisting of two stressed syllables. In English, the spondee
is an occasional device of metrical variation. The normal alternation of stressed and
unstressed syllables in English makes it very difficult to compose a complete line of true
spondees. Some English compound words like ‘childbirth’ are spondaic, although even these
do not have exactly equal stresses.

Stream of consciousness: The continuous flow of sense-perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and

memories in the human mind; or a literary method of representing such a blending of
mental processes in fictional characters, usually in an unpunctuated or disjointed form of
interior monologue. It may be considered a special style of interior monologue: while an
interior monologue always presents a character’s thoughts ‘directly’, without the apparent
intervention of a summarising and selecting narrator, it does not necessarily mingle them
with impressions and perceptions, nor does it necessarily violate the norms of grammar,
syntax and logic; but the stream-of-consciousness technique also does one or both of these
things.

Stress: The relative emphasis given in pronunciation to a syllable, in loudness, pitch or

duration (or some combination of these). In English verse, the metre of a line is determined
by the number of stresses in a sequence composed of stressed and unstressed syllables
(also referred to as strongly stressed and weakly stressed syllables.

Synaesthesia: A blending or confusion of different kinds of sense-impression, in which one

type of sensation is referred to in terms more appropriate to another. Common synaesthetic
expressions include the descriptions of colours as ‘loud or warm’, and of sounds as smooth.

Synonym: A word that has the same (or virtually the same) meaning as another word, and
so can substitute for it in certain contexts. E.g. beautiful / pretty/ attractive. This identity of
meaning is called synonymy.

Syntax: The way in which words and clauses are ordered and connected so as to from
sentences; or the set of grammatical rules governing such word-order. Syntax is a major
determinant of literary style: while simple English sentences usually have the structure
‘subject-verb-object’ e.g. ‘Jane fed the cat.’, poets often distort this syntax through
inversion, while prose writers can exploit elaborate syntactic structure.
Tercet: A unit of three verse lines, usually rhyming either with each other or with
neighbouring lines. The three-line stanzas of terza rima and of the villanelle are known as
tercets. The sestet of an Italian sonnet is composed of two tercets.

Third-person narrative: A narrative or mode of storytelling in which the narrator is not a

character within the events related, but stands outside those events. In a third-person
narrative, all characters within the story are therefore referred to as ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘they’; but
this does not, of course, prevent the narrator from using the first person ‘I’ or ‘we’ on
commentary on the events and their meaning. Third-person narrators are often omniscient
or ‘all-knowing; about the events of the story, but they may sometimes appear to be
restricted in their knowledge of these events. Third-person narrative is by far the most
common form of story-telling.

Trochee: A metrical unit (foot) of verse, having one stressed syllable followed by one
unstressed syllable, as in the word ‘tender’. Lines of verse made up predominantly of
trochees are referred to as trochaic verse or trochaics. Regular trochaic lines are quite rare
in English. Longfellow’s ‘Song of Hiawatha’ (1855) is a celebrate example of their extended
use:
Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple
Far more common in English is the truncated (or catalectic) line that drops the final
unstressed syllable as in Emily Bronte’s lines:
Long neglect has worn away
Half the sweet enchanting smile.
Since the trochee is often substituted as a variation at the beginning of iambic lines, this sort
of trochaic line beginning and ending with a stressed syllable can be difficult to distinguish
from iambic verse.

Verse: 1. Poetry, as distinct from prose. 2. A line of poetry; or sometimes a stanza. Strictly,
the term should refer to a line rather than a stanza. To avoid confusion, it is preferable to
call a line a line and a stanza a stanza.

Verse paragraphs: A group of verse lines forming a subdivision of a poem, the length of this
unit being determined by the development of the sense rather than by a formal stanza
pattern. Long narrative poems in blank verse or heroic couplets are often divided into
paragraphs of uneven lengths. The subdivisions of free verse are necessarily non-stanzaic
and are therefore also usually called verse paragraphs.

Versification: The techniques, principles, and practice of composing verse, especially in its
technical aspects of metre, rhyme, and stanza form; or the conversion of a prose passage or
work into metrical verse form.

Villanelle: A poem composed of an uneven number (usually five) of tercets rhyming aba,
with a final quatrain rhyming abaa. The first and third lines of the opening tercet are
repeated alternately as the third lines of the succeeding tercets, and together as the final
couplet of the quatrain. Here is Edwin Arlington Robinsons’ The House on the Hill’ (1894):
 They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray

The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.

Nor is there one to-day

To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.

Why is it then we stray

Around the sunken sill?
They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play

For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay

In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.

Volta: The Italian term for the turn in the argument or mood of a sonnet, occurring in the
Italian from of sonnet, between the octave and the sestet i.e. at the 9 th line. In the Miltonic
variant of the Italian pattern, the volta comes later, about the 10th line; while in the
Shakespearean or English form of the sonnet – which does not observe the octave/sestet
division – it usually comes with the final couplet, i.e. at the 13 th line.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins
MEETING AT NIGHT

The grey sea and the long black land;

And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

II
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!

Robert Browning

THE OTHER

There are nights that are so still

that I can hear the small owl calling
far off and a fox barking
miles away. It is then that I lie
in the lean hours awake listening
to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic
rising and falling, rising and falling
wave on wave on the long shore
by the village that is without light
and companionless. And the thought comes
of that other being who is awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.

R.S. Thomas
 PIANO by D.H. Lawrence

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;

Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song

Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour

With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

SOAP SUDS by Louis Macneice

This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big
House he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom open
To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop
To rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.

And these were the joys of that house: a tower with a telescope;
Two great faded globes, one of the earth, one of the stars;
A stuffed black dog in the hall; a walled garden with bees;
A rabbit warren; a rockery; a vine under glass; the sea.

To which he has now returned. The day of course is fine

And a grown-up voice cries Play! The mallet slowly swings,
Then crack, a great gong booms from the dog-dark hall and the ball
Skims forward through the hoop and then through the next and then

Through hoops where no hoops were and each dissolves in turn

And the grass has grown head-high and an angry voice cries Play!
But the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands
Under the running tap that are not the hands of a child.
SONNET 55 by William Shakespeare

Not marble nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the Judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

SONNET 116 by William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
 ONE ART by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
AFTERNOONS by Philip Larkin

Summer is fading:
The leaves fall in ones and twos
From trees bordering
The new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons
Young mothers assemble
At swing and sandpit
Setting free their children.

Behind them, at intervals,

Stand husbands in skilled trades,
An estateful of washing,
And the albums, lettered
Our Wedding, lying
Near the television:
Before them, the wind
Is ruining their courting-places

That are still courting-places

(But the lovers are all in school),
And their children, so intent on
Finding more unripe acrons,
Expect to be taken home.
Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.