speaker
 The narrator of a poem (as with other pieces of
literature, the narrator can be first person, third
person limited, third person omniscient, or second
person)
tone
 The mood of the work itself. Tone results from
combinations and variations of such things as meter,
rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, diction,
sentence structure, repetetion, imagery, etc.
Imagery:descriptive language used to create word
pictures for the reader
 sensory language: writing or speech that appeals to
one or more of the senses
 literal language: the use of words in their ordinary or
sense
 figurative language: writing or speech not meant to be
interpreted literally. It is often used to create vivid
impressions by setting up comparisons between
dissimilar things.
 Visual imagery appeals specifically to the sense of sight
 Aural imagery appeals specifically to the sense of hearing
 Tactile imagery appeals specifically to the sense of touch
 Olfactory imagery appeals specifically to the sense of smell
 Gustatory imagery appeals specifically to the sense of taste
oxymoron
 a self-contradictory combination of words or smaller
verbal units
Ex. bittersweet; jumbo shrimp
apostrophe
 a figure of speech in which someone (usually, but not
always, absent), some abstract quality, or a nonexistent
person is directly addressed as though present.
Ex: “Age, thou art sham’d!” (William Shakespeare)
metonymy
 A figure of speech characterized by the substitution of
a term naming an object closely associated with the
word in mind for the word itself
Ex: speaking of a king as “the crown”
synecdoche
 A figure of speech in which a part signifies the whole
or the whole signifies the part
Ex. calling clothes “threads” or a car “wheels”
onomatopoeia
 The use of words that by their sound suggest their
meaning

Ex. bang, snap, crackle
assonance
 Similar vowel sounds in stressed syllables that end
with different consonant sounds
Ex:
lake and fate
mad as a hatter
free and easy
consonance
 Words in which the final consonants agree, but the
vowels that precede them differ
Ex.
add – read
bill – ball
blood - food
Rhyme: the repetition of sounds at the ends
of words
 End rhyme occurs at the ends of lines
 Internal rhyme occurs within lines
 Exact or perfect rhyme occurs when the the repeated sounds are
exactly similar to each other
 Slant rhyme (also called imperfect rhyme or near rhyme) refers
to words that come close to rhyming, but don’t actually rhyme
(see pg. 908)
 Rhyme scheme: a regular pattern of rhyming words (lines) in a
poem
stanza
a formal division of lines in a poem, considered as a unit;
Stanzas are often separated by spaces
couplet
 a pair of rhyming lines, usually of the same length and
meter
tercet
 A stanza comprised of three lines
quatrain
 A stanza comprised of four lines
octave
 A stanza comprised of eight lines
repetition
 the use of any element of language—a sound, a word, a
phrase, a clause, or a sentence—more than once. This
is typically done to achieve a particular effect.
Allusion
 A reference to a well-known person, place, event,
literary work, or work of art
Diction: word choice, including the vocabulary used, the
appropriateness of the words, and the vividness of the language
 Denotation: the dictionary defintion of a word,
independent of other associations the word may have
 Connotation: the set of ideas associated with a word
in addition to its dictionary meaning
 To review/learn poetry terms
 To practice/learn to explicate a poem effectively
 To read as much poetry as possible
 To play and experiment with words, p0etic devices and
a variety of forms in the writing of your own poetry in
order to create a poetry anthology