Poems A Presentation

Ballad A poem that tells a story or describes a serious of events, originally sung by a strolling minstrel.

Blank Verse A form of unrhymed poetry written in iambic pentameter.

Connotation The ideas, feelings or associations that a word suggests in addition to its primary, literal meaning.

End-Stopped Line A strong grammatical pause {usually punctuated} at the end of a line of symmetry.

Enjambment A line of poetry which is not end-stopped, where the sentence continues to the next line without a grammatical pause or stop.

Envoi A refrain or summary that comes at the end of a sestina or ballade, often four lines long or half the length of a stanza.

Epic Poem A lengthy narrative poem that is heroic and written in an elevated style.

Foot The basic unit of a metre – certain fixed combinations of weakly and strongly stressed syllables into which the line is divided. Types of feet include iamb and trochee.

Form The shape of the poem on the page.

Free Verse Poetry that does not use traditional rhythm schemes or metrical arrangements.

Heroic Couplets Rhyming pairs of lines usually in iambic pentameter with ten alternately stressed syllables and a rhyme scheme progressing aa bb cc and so on; the strong rhyme scheme and very regular beat made it a popular choice for satirical or epigrammatic poetry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Iambic Pentameter A line of four iambic feet, the metre used in most ballad forms.

Idiom A colloquial or slang expression.

Imagery The use of descriptive language, including figures of speech, that draws a mental picture or conveys a sensation; a comparison to describe something through simile, metaphor or personification.

Imperative A type of sentence which gives a command or an instruction.

Internal Rhyme Words that rhyme within a line or adjacent lines rather than at the end of the line.

Irony Language that says one thing but means another.

Limerick A five-lined poem, which usually tells the story of a character from a particular place, and has a distinctive rhythm and an aabba rhyme scheme.

Lyric A short poem or song written in the first person expressing a particular emotion or sentiment.

Metaphor A figure of Speech

Metre The dominant pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that give rhythm to a poem.

Motif A recurring and distinctive idea running through a text, such as an image or symbol, or a word, phrase or idea.

Octet In Petrarchan sonnet form, the first eight lines consisting of two quatrains, rhyming abba abba

Ode A poem that addresses an object, event or element of landscape or a person, sometimes in an elevated style; modern versions of the form can be witty or even irreverent.

Onomatopoeia A word whose vocal sound imitates its description, e.g. buzz, pop

Oxymoron A contrasting word or phrase that contains two elements with opposite meanings, e.g. bitter sweet or living dead.

Parody A writer’s technique for mocking something through comic imitation

Past Tense The form of a verb expressing something that occurred or existed previously

Perfect Rhyme Where the vowel sounds at the end of lines echo each other exactly {eg ‘sash/cash’ ‘imply/defy’}.

Personification The representation of a quality or idea as a human figure or having human characteristics.

Quatrain A stanza comprising of four lines

Realistic Something that has been created, such as a character in a novel, that seems true to life.

Register A form of language appropriate to a particular situation or context.

Rhyme When one sound is echoed by another sound exactly the same or very similar.

Rhyme Scheme The pattern of rhymes in a stanza or section of verse, usually expressed by an alphabetical code.

Sestet A group of six lines; in Petrarchan sonnet form, the final lines rhyming cdcd.

Sestina A 39-lined poem with six stanzas and a final three–lined envoi {summary}, in which the six words in each stanza are repeated in a set pattern but a changing order.

Sibilance Repetition of ‘s’ sounds.

Sight Rhymes Half rhymes that look on the page like they should be a full rhyme, but the words actually sound differently when spoken {eg ‘now/know’, ‘plough, trough’}.

Simile A comparison between two things that are not usually compared, using the words ‘as’ or ‘like’.

Sonnet A 14-lined poem in iambic pentameter, usually following either a Shakespearian or Petrachan form.

Tone The quality or character of a voice, the way it expresses a feeling.

Trochee A type of metre-two syllables: one stressed followed by one unstressed syllable.

Verse Form The generic structure of poetry, eg a ballad, blank verse, a sonnet.