Alliteration

Repetition of initial consonant sounds:

Example: With blade, with bloody, blameful blade…

Assonance

Assonance is the repetition of middle vowel sounds

Example: fight/hive (note the “I” sounds)

Blank Verse

Blank verse is unrhymed uniambic pentameter. (Note: this is what the majority of Shakespeare’s plays are written in.)

Consonance

Consonance is the repetition of inner or end consonant sounds in words.

Example: broods with warm breast (note the “r” sounds).

Foot

A foot is made up of a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry (and typically represents one beat).

Rising Feet

The two types of rising feet are

Iamb

Anapest

Falling Feet

The two type of falling feet are

Trochee

Dactyl

Other types of feet

Spondee: two unstressed syllables in a row.

Pyrrhic foot: two stressed syllables in a row.

Free Verse

Free verse is poetry (usually contemporary) that has no meter or rhyme, and line length may vary.

Internal Rhyme

This happens when you have rhyme within a line (which is itself an example)

Another example: “There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold.”

Meter

Meter is the number of feet per line

Monometer: one footDimeter: two feetTrimeter: three feetTetrameter: four feetPentameter: five feetHexameter: six feetHeptameter: seven feet

Onomatopoeia

The use of words to imitate real sounds

Example: crack, snap, buzz

Personification

Personification is giving human characteristics to either animate or inanimate things.

Rhyme

Exact: rose, toes

Slant: hiss, fizz

Identical: cat, cat

Rhyme Scheme

The marking of end rhymes (at the end of a line) with letters, such as A, B, A, B

Example:

Annihilating all that’s made (A)

To a green thought in a green shade (A)

Scansion

Marking the feet and meter for the poem, so as to identify its overall pattern, such as iambic pentameter

Sestina

A poem consisting of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three line closer. The words at the end of each stanza are repeated in new patterns in successive stanzas.

Sonnet

A poem of 14 lines in iambic pentameter, consisting of three quatrains and a couplet, with a rhyme scheme of ABAB,CDCD,EFEF, GG

Stanza

A grouping of lines in a poem (equivalent to a paragraph in prose).

Two lines: couplet

Three lines: tercet

Four lines: quatrain

Villanelle

A poem consisting of five tercet and a quatrain, in which the first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated as the final lines of the following tercets—and then used together in the close.