Stanza
• Lines of fixed length, used in
poetry to organize ideas. They
act similarly to paragraphs.
Language Arts rocks,
this statement is true,
When I’m not in class,
I feel very blue.
Speaker
• The character talking to us in a
poem. It may be the poet, but
most likely it is a character
created by the poet.
Voice
• The tone of the speaker’s
“voice”: happy, sad, scared,
angry, etc.
Palms sweating,
heart pounding,
I tiptoed up the stairs
only to find
my worst fear
realized.
Mood
• The feeling a piece of poetry
arouses in the reader:
happiness, sadness, etc.
Death,
Death everywhere.
Stench,
Silence.
Hot tears
dripping off my cheeks.
Symbolism
• Use of an object in a poem to
stand for or have meaning for
something else entirely.
The setting sun=death
A red rose=love
Structure
• Physical construction a poet
puts into a poem for deliberate
effect: stanzas, indentations,
capitalization, punctuation, line
length, rhyme scheme, etc.
Literal Meaning
• Literally, what the poem is
about.
•
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference
...Robert Frost
Symbolic Meaning
• Think bigger; what message may the poet
be trying to get across to you?
•
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference
...Robert Frost
Free-Verse Poetry
• Free verse is poetry that doesn’t
have a regular rhythm, line length, or
rhyme scheme. Free-verse poetry
invents and following its own forms,
patterns, and rules.
Boys…
greasy, mean, no good boys.
I don’t care,
he doesn’t like me,
here one day, gone the next,
just like my no good father.
Why do we even have to have
boys?
Personification
• Giving human qualities to
inanimate objects.
• “The wind howled through the night.”
• “The walls whispered.”
Simile
• A comparison that uses “like” or
“as”.
• “The cat has eyes as dark as a
night river.”
Metaphor
• A comparison of two things
without using “like” or “as”. It
says one thing is something
else.
• “The eyes are flashing beacons.”
• “The student is a raging animal.”
Alliteration
• Repetition of the initial
consonants of words:
• Setting sun
• Peter piper picked a peck of pickled
peppers
Onomatopoeia
• A word that imitates the sound
it represents.
•
•
•
•
Buzz
Crash
Bang
Splash
Hyperbole
• An extreme exaggeration
• I tried opening my locker a million times
and it wouldn’t work!
• I Could eat a whole cow!