Poetry Vocabulary
Free verse – no special pattern in poetry (“Contantly Risking Absurdity”; Lawrence
Ferlinghetti – pg 605)
Open form – another name for Free Verse
Closed form – traditional poems –Rhyme, meter, - Traditional form
Accent – strong syllable, or syllables, in a word – the word we emphasize with breath and
tone when spoken out loud
Strong Accent – the syllable stressed
Weak Accent – the syllable unstressed
Scansion – analyzing the meter by placing the accents and counting the beats in a line
METER
Meter – the pattern set up by the regular rhythm of a poem
Foot – one unit of the rhythmic pattern that makes up the meter
Monometer – one foot
Dimeter – two feet
Trimeter – three feet
Tetrameter – four feet
Pentameter – five feet
Hexameter – six feet
Heptameter – seven feet
Octameter – Eight feet
Iamb – a weak and a strong syllable pattern
Iambic meter – a line with weak-strong, weak-strong pattern
Trochee – strong and weak syllable pattern
Trochaic meter – a line with strong-weak, strong-weak pattern
Anapest – a rhythmic foot of two unaccented syllables followed by a strong syllable
Anapestic Meter – a line with weak-weak-strong accents…
Dactyl – a rhythmic foot with a strong syllable followed by two weak syllables
Dactylic Meter – a line with strong-weak-weak accents
Caesura – a break in the meter, it stops and starts up somewhere in a line – natural flow
of speech
Anacrusis – an unstressed syllable at the beginning of a line that does not affect the
overall meter
Iambic Pentameter – a series of 5 iamb patterns…weak-strong, weak-strong….(William
Shakespeare)
Trochaic Octameter – 8 syllable line – strong-weak pattern (“The Raven”, E. A. Poe)
Spondee – two strong accents together
Pyrrhus – two weak accents together
Rising meter – two feet that begin with a weak syllable, iambic and anapestic
Falling meter – two feet that begin with a strong syllable, trochaic and dactylic
Blank verse – form that utilizes the oratorical style of a long line in regular meter, but
without the confines of rhyme – meter is iambic pentameter but writers generally
allow themselves considerable metric freedom (Shakespeare in Plays)
Tone – different than sound – changes the meaning of the words