Useful Terms:
Alliteration: a repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of neighboring words.
Example: The stars send rays of celestial light into the night sky.
Assonance: a repetition of vowel sounds, which may occur within words. Example: He loves to sleep above the rug, under a blanket.
Caesura: a break within a line of poetry, used to add interest/lyrical quality, as well as to affect meaning. Example: Things falls apart; the center cannot hold.
Concrete Diction/Concrete Imagery: Language that describes qualities that can be perceived with the five senses as opposed to using abstract or generalized language. For instance, calling a fruit "pleasant" or "good" is abstract, while calling a fruit "cool" or "sweet" is
concrete.
Consonance: a repetition of consonant sounds that may occur anywhere within neighboring words. Example: The rapidly arranged wedding created a flurry of activity for the planners.
Ecphrasis/Ekphrasis: the graphic, often dramatic, description of a visual work of art.
M
End Rhyme: the final words of neighboring lines rhyme. Example: I cannot go too
far/Without my faithful jelly jar.
End Stop: a grammatical pause at the end of a line of verse, indicated by a punctuation mark, such as a comma, semicolon, or period. Example:
From Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:
A glooming peace this morning with it brings.
The sun for sorrow will not show his head.
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things.
Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished.
Enjambment: the continuation of a sentence or clause over a line-break; the breaking of a syntactic unit (a phrase, clause, or sentence) by the end of a line or between two verses.
Example:
From Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale:
I am not prone to weeping, as our sex
Commonly are; the want of which vain dew
Perchance shall dry your pities; but I have
That honourable grief lodged here which burns
Worse than tears drown.

Homoioteleuton (ho-mee-o-te-loot'-on): similarity of endings of adjacent or parallel words.
The following example comes from Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven:
He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heavy ground of existence.
Internal Rhyme: rhyme that occurs in a single line of verse, or in neighboring lines of verse.
Example: Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary
Metaphor: A figure of speech in which an implicit comparison is made between two unlike things that actually have something in common. Example: The streets were a furnace, the sun an executioner (Cynthia Ozick, Rosa).
Personification: a figure of speech in which an inanimate object or abstraction is given human qualities or abilities. For example,
The wind stood up and gave a shout.
He whistled on his fingers and
Kicked the withered leaves about
And thumped the branches with his hand
And said he'd kill and kill and kill,
And so he will! And so he will!
(James Stephens, "The Wind")
Simile: a figure of speech that directly compares two different things, usually by employing the words "like", or "as." For example,
Shrek: Ogres are like onions.
Donkey: They stink?
Shrek: Yes. No!
Donkey: They make you cry?
Shrek: No!
Donkey: You leave them out in the sun, they get all brown, start sprouting little white hairs.
Shrek: No! Layers! Onions have layers!
(Shrek, 2001)