POETRY TERMS 1

Synecdoche

A kind of metaphor in which a part of something is used to signify the whole, such as a crab begin referred to as “a pair of claws” in T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, a gossip being called a “wagging tongue,” or ten ships called “ten sails.”

Sometimes synecdoche refers to the whole being used to signify the part as in “Philadelphia lost the game,” or “Oxford is competing in the competition.”

Metonymy

A kind of metaphor in which something closely associated with a subject is substituted for it, such as saying “the White House” to refer to the actions of the president, or “the crown” to refer to the king

Conceit

A fanciful expression, usually in the form of an extended metaphor or surprising analogy between seemingly dissimilar objects; it is a surprising juxtaposition of two ideas or subjects to evoke a more complex understanding.

A conceit displays intellectual cleverness due to the unusual comparison being made. The last line in the poem “Evening Hawk” uses conceit when it compares history to a leaking pipe in the cellar.

Assonance The repetition of an internal vowel

sound: “asleep under a tree” or “each evening.”

Consonance A type of approximate rhyme that

consists of identical consonant sounds preceded by different vowel sounds: home, same; worth, breath

Doggerel A derogatory term used to describe

poetry whose subject is trite and whose rhythm and sounds are monotonously heavy-handed. Examples of doggerels are difficult to find; since they are considered doggerels, they are not preserved.

A girl who is bespectacled She may not get her nectacled But safety pins and bassinets

Await the girl who fassinets.

Alliteration The repetition of initial consonant sounds

Apostrophe Direct address in poetry, such as Yeat’s line

“Be with me Beauty, for the fire is dying”

Allusion A reference contained in a work

Enjambment A technique in poetry that involves

the running on of a line or stanza. The idea continues from one line to the next without pause. It enables the poem to move and to develop coherence as well as directing the reader with regard to form and meaning.

The moon’s man stands in his shell,Bent under a bundleOf sticks. The light falls chalk and coldUpon our bedspread.

Personification A figurative use of language which endows

the nonhuman with human characteristics

Oxymoron A condensed form of paradox in which two

contradictory words are used together, such as “sweet sorrow”

Anacrusis One or more unstressed syllables at

the beginning of a line that do not form part of the regular meter.

In the Star Spangled Banner the first word “Oh” is anacrusis

Elision The dropping of a syllable, or the

combining of two syllables into one, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s line: Thy light alone—like mist o’er mountains driven

Catalexis The omission of an unexpected

unstressed syllable from the end of a line

Tyger Tyger burning bright In the forests of the night

Blake wrote these lines in trochaic feet–stressed + unstressed, but the final foot of each line is incomplete, containing only a stressed syllable, bright and night are called catalectic feet.

Rising meter

Metrical feet that move from unstressed to stressed sounds- such as the iambic (unstressed followed by stressed) and anapestic (two unstressed followed by one stressed)

Falling meter Refers to metrical feet that move

from stressed to unstressed sounds, such as trochaic (stressed followed by unstressed) and dactylic (stressed followed by two stressed)