And a few examples
 French
for “striding over”
 A poetic expression that spans more than one
line. Lines exhibiting enjambment do not end
with grammatical breaks, and their sense is
not complete without the following line.
Sometimes these lines are referred to as
“run-on” lines.
“It is a beautious evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquility.”
“I am inside someone
who hates me. I look
out from his eyes. Smell
what fouled tunes come in
to his breath. Love his
wretched women.”
A
pause in a line of poetry. Sometimes it
occurs with punctuation, but occasionally it
occurs where a slight pause is inevitable. The
caesura is indicated not by the meter of the
poem, but by natural speaking rhythm. The
caesure is indicated with ||
From Willliam Butler Yeats “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1893)
“I will arise and go now,|| for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping||with low sounds by the shore…”
From Shakespeare:
“To err is human, || to forgive, divine.
From Andrew Marvell “To His Coy Mistress”
“Had we but world enough, ||and time
This coyness, lady, ||were no crime.
We would sit down, ||and think which way
To walk, ||and pass our long love’s day.
A
figure of speech in which directly and often
emotionally a person who is dead or
otherwise not physically present, an
imaginary person or entity, something
inhuman, supernatural, or a place or concept
 The
speaker addresses the object of the
apostrophe as though it is present and
capable of understanding.
From “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” by Lord
Byron:
“I said to Love,
‘It is not now as in old days
When men adored thee and thy ways
All else above;
Named thee the Boy, the Bright, the One
Who spread a heaven beneath the sun.’
I said to Love.”
From Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, An American Slave (yes,
apostrophe appears in prose as well)
(Douglass is addressing ships sailing through Chesapeake Bay)
“You are loosed from your moorings and are
free; I am fast in my chains and am a slave!
You move merrily before the gentle gale, and
I sadly before the bloody whip!
The omission of part of a word (typically a
letter) and the replacement of it with an
apostrophe.
Often employed to make verse more rhythmic,
or to conform to a metrical pattern
Like “Ne’er” for “never” or “o’er” for “over”
“Sol thro’ white curtains shot a tim’rous ray,
And op’d those eyes that must eclipse the
day…” (don’t you feel smart for recognizing
this?)
From “Beauty” by Abraham Cowley (1656)
“Thou flatt’rer which compli’st every sight!
Thou Babel which confound’st the eye
With unintelligible variety!”
(two versions of “apostrophe” here)
A rhetorical device in which certain words,
sounds, concepts, or syntactic structures are
reversed or repeated in reverse order. The
term comes from the Greek letter X or “chi”
implying that the two parts of a chiastic
whole mirror each other like the letter.
Shakespeare (from Macbeth)
“Fair is foul and foul is fair”
From The Dead by James Joyce
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly
through the universe and faintly falling.”
From Coleridge:
“Flowers are lovely, love is flowerlike.”
From John F. Kennedy:
“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can
do for your country.”
Either a short poem with a brief, pointedly
humorous , quotable ending, or simply a
terse, witty statement
terse: short and to the point
Money cannot buy
The fuel of love:
But it is excellent kindling. W.H.Auden
If life were fair, Elvis would be alive and his
impersonators would be dead.—Johnny Carson
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others
whenever they go.—Oscar Wilde
To err is human, but it feels divine.—Mae West
(Elegiac)
Reflective poems that lament the loss of
someone or something (often through death)
Until the end of the 17th century, the term
could also be used for love poems.
Elegiac is the adjective version used to
describe these types of poems or this tone.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering
heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sire's return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.
A stanza appearing at the close of certain
kinds of poems. Usually French ballad (or
ballade) – usually a quatrain in bcbc rhyme
scheme.
Often the envoy is addressed to a prince, a
patron, or another person of importance.
At the end of a sestina, the envoy is three
lines.
Prince, do you sleep to the sound alway
Of the mournful surge and the sea-birds'
crying? —
Or does love still shudder and steel still
slay,
Where the bones of the brave in the wave are
lying?
Edward Arlington Robinson
Youth, take heed to the prayer of these!
Many there be by the dusty way,—
Many that cry to the rocks and seas
"Give us—ah! give us—but Yesterday!“
Austin Dobson
Ballad: a poem that recounts a story – usually a
dramatic episode, and is composed to sound
good as a song – the traditional ballad
addressed noble subjects but was written in
simple language
Ballade: a more formal french form consisting
of three long stanzas (usually eight lines) and
a concluding envoy
All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the moon.
…Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A tightly structured French verse form,
consisting of six sestets (six-line stanzas) and
an envoy. The sestina originated in medieval
France.
The six terminal words of the first stanza are
repeated in a complicated formula in subsequent
stanzas:
1-2-3-4-5-6, 6-1-5-2-4-3, 3-6-4-1-2-5,
5-3-2-6-1-4, 4-5-1-3-6-2, 2-4-6-5-3-1
Envoy’s terminal words: 5-3-1
PlUS: the other three terminal words must appear
in the middle of the envoy in a 2-4-6 pattern.
Italian word for “turn.” In a sonnet, the volta
is the turn of thought or argument
In a Shakespearean sonnet, it usually happens
in the concluding couplet
Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
The repetition of a final consonant sound
following different vowel sounds in words
that are near to each other (made/wood)
Let the boy try along this bayonet blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of
blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.
Wilfred Owen
Alliteration usually refers to initial consonant
sounds or those at the beginning of stressed
syllables – it is more obvious.
For example:
“The voice of the sea is seductive, never
ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring,…
-Kate Chopin
“The birds fire-fangled feathers dangle down”
-Wallace Stevens
5 different variations
(called “feet”)
1. spondee: two stressed syllables
(daylight, carpool, sea breeze)
2. trochee: one stressed, one unstressed
(party, trochee, little)
3. iamb: one unstressed, one stressed
(afloat, respect) this is the most common metrical foot in English
poetry
4. dactyl: one accented followed by two
unaccented (portable, marginal, ecstasy)
5. anapest: two unstressed followed by a stressed
syllable (contradict, interfere, are you mad?)
Spondee:
Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at close of day
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas, 1952
Trochee:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered
weak and weary
Edgar Allen Poe
iamb: You have seen this before.
But soft what light through yonder window breaks,
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun
Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears
William Wordsworth
“A slumber did my spirit seal”
Dactyl:
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of death,
Into the mouth of hell…
Alfred, Lord Tennyson “Charge of the Light Brigade”
Cellophane flowers of yellow and green
Towering over your head
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes
And she’s gone
“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”
The Beatles
Monometer: 1 foot
Dimeter: 2 feet
Trimeter: 3 feet
Tetrameter: 4 feet
Pentameter: 5 feet
Hexameter: 6 feet
heptameter: 7 feet
Octameter: 8 feet
Monometer (rare in English):
“Thus I
Pass by
And die.
As one,
Unknown,
And gone.”
Robert Herrick
1648
Dimeter (also rare)
“Dear Lizbie Browne
Where are you now?
In sun, in rain? –
Or is your brow
Past joy, past pain…”
Thomas Hardy
1901
Trimeter:
“Oh to be in England
Now that April’s there…”
Robert Browning 1873
(what type of foot is this?)
Tretameter
“Before man came to blow it right
The wind once blew itself untaught,
And did its loudest day and night
In any rough place where it caught”
Robert Frost
Pentameter: you know this one already
We stress the words we want the world to hear
Hexameter:
“This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks…”
Longfellow
Heptameter:
“I went into a public ‘ouse to get a pint o’ beer,
The publican ‘e up and’ sez, ‘We server no redcoats here.”
Rudyard Kipling
Octameter:
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I
pondered weak and weary…”
Edgar Allen Poe
Shakespearean:
Three quatrains and a couplet (14 lines)
Iambic pentameter
Rhyme scheme: abab,cdcd,efef,gg
Petrarchan: (or Italian)
An octave and a sestet (14 lines also)
Iambic pentameter
Octave (8 lines) rhyme scheme: abbaabba
Sestet (6 lines) rhyme scheme: cdecde or
sometimes cdcdcd.
Often the octave poses a question, the sestet
answers.
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses ssee I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go, -My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
“In Zanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.” William Taylor Coleridge
“It is a beauteous evening, calm and free;
The holy time is quiet as a Nun,
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity.”
William Wordsworth
Ye who love a nation's legends,
Love the ballads of a people,
That like voices from afar off
Call to us to pause and listen,
Speak in tones so plain and childlike,
Scarcely can the ear distinguish
Whether they are sung or spoken;
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
SOMETIMES REFERRED TO AS “HALF
RHYME”
a form of rhyme in which words contain similar
sounds but do not rhyme perfectly
(also called near rhyme, oblique rhyme,
approximate rhyme, and imperfect rhyme)
Examples: rhyme/writhe, horse/hearse,
summer/humble, feel/still
Emily Dickenson used it frequently
In winter in my Room
I came upon a Worm
Pink lank and warm.
Emily Dickinson
1860
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,By his dead smile I knew we stood in hell….
“I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried, but my hands were loathe and cold.
Wilfred Owen 1920 “Strange Meeting”
lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter
(Shakespeare uses it a lot)
…but poets should
Exert a double vision; should have eyes
To see near things as comprehensively
As if afar they took their point of sight,
And distant things as intimately deep
As if they touched them. Let us strive for this.
I do distrust the poet who discerns
No character or glory in his times…
From an extremely long poem, like a novel – 11,000 lines!
Titled “Aurora Leigh”
From French “vers libre”
Poetry that lacks a regular meter, does not
rhyme, and uses irregular line lengths.
Free verse has been around a long time, but
Walt Whitman was the first to make it a
recognized “new” form.
Writers of free verse often rely on parallelism,
and repetition and ordinary cadences of
speech.
in the quiver on Paris’s back the head
of the arrow for Achilles’ heel
smiled in its sleep
and Helen stepped from the palace to gather
as she would do every day in that season
from the grove the yellow ray flowers tall
as herself
whose roots are said to dispel pain
Rhyme that occurs within a line of verse.
Example:
From “We Are Seven” by William Wordsworth
“Their graves are green, they may be seen,”
The little maid replied,
“Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door,
And they are side by side.”
Once upon a midnight dreary while I pondered
weak and weary…
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there
came a tapping…
The rule-governed arrangement, ordering,
grouping, and placement – of words within a
sentence.
1.
2.
3.
4.
“Something there is that doesn’t love a
wall”
by Robert Frost
“Whose woods these are I think I know.” by
Robert Frost
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
and a small cabin build there, of clay and
wattles made.” by W.B. Yeats
And dwells such Rage in softest Bosoms
then?
And lodge such daring Souls in Little Men?
by You Know Who