Understanding Poetry: Key Terms and Concepts

1. New Poetry Terms!

2. Assonance • The repetition of vowel sounds but not consonant sounds • Examples: fleet feet sweep by sleeping geeks. "Old age should burn and rave at close of day;Rage, rage, against the dying of the light."

3. Ballad Stanza • A four-line stanza that alternates between 4 and 3-stress lines • rhyme scheme of a/b/c/b pattern • Does NOT have to be throughout whole poem, just the given stanza

4. Ballad Stanza • Example: All in a hot and copper sky! The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon.

5. dissonance • Words in a line/stanza that don't normally sound "pleasant" or "harmonic" with one another. • Example: Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,The rushing amorous contact high in space together,The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,

6. Elegy • A melancholic or mournful poem, often used to describe grief for the dead. • Could “Anne Frank” be considered a Elegy? Why or why not?

7. Epic • a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation

8. Epigram • A brief, clever and most times memorable statement. • Example: Here lies my wife: here let her lie! Now she's at rest – and so am I.

9. Epitaph • A short text honoring a dead person, usually written on their tomb stone.

10. Extended Metaphor • A metaphor that continues into the sentences or stanzas that follow. It is often developed at great length, occurring frequently in or throughout a piece of work. • What is an example of extended metaphor in “Anne Frank”?

11. Parody • The imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist or genre with deliberate exaggeration for dramatic effect. • Ex. Scary movie, Saturday Night Live