Poetry Vocabulary

Theme

The central theme of a poem represents its controlling idea. This idea is crafted and developed throughout the poem and can be identified by assessing the poem’s rhythm, setting, tone, mood, diction and, occasionally, title. The theme is rarely stated explicitly, and it is not a moral but an important idea that is prevalent throughout the poem.

Form

The structure and organization of a poem

Symbolism

The use of one object or action to represent or suggest something else.

Example from Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken:

Then took the other [road], as just as fair, / And having perhaps the better claim, / Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

A road which is “grassy and wanted wear.” This road symbolizes the poet’s choice to go down a less common path in life, and not just the literal path in the forest. The other two excerpts are simply his reflections on the choice, rather than the symbol itself.

Free Verse

Poetry without rhythms and rhyme schemes; do not follow regular rhyme scheme rules and still provide artistic expression. In this way, the poet can give his own shape to a poem how he/she desires. However, it still allows poets to use alliteration, rhyme, cadences or rhythms to get the effects that they consider are suitable for the piece.

Personification

A figure of speech in which a thing, an idea or an animal is given human attributes.

“Have you got a brook in your little heart,Where bashful flowers blow,And blushing birds go down to drink,And shadows tremble so?”

Have You Got A Brook In Your Little Heart

by Emily Dickinson

Verse

A line of a poem.

Rhythm

A musical quality produced by the repetition of stressed and unstressed syllables or by the repetition of other certain sound patterns.

Two households, both alike in dignity,In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.From forth the fatal loins of these two foesA pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;

(Romeo Juliet by Shakespeare)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqhPp-ptoJA

Metaphor

An imaginative comparison between two unlike things in which one thing is said to be another

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

Sonnet 18

By William Shakespeare

Imagery

Language that appeals to the seven senses.

Narrative Poetry

A Poem that tells a story.

NOT an epic: Epics have superhuman or extraordinary happenings, narratives do not.

Stanzas

A group of consecutive lines in a poem that form a single unit. It is comparable to a paragraph in a essay.

Figurative Language

An expressive form of language.

Examples: Simile, Metaphor, Personification, Onomatopoeia, Hyperbole, Alliteration, etc.

Rhyme

The repetition of accented vowel sounds and all sounds following them in words that are close together in a poem.

Simile

A comparison between two unlike things, using words such as like, as, than, or resembles.

Example: Her face was as round as a pumpkin.

Allteration

The repetition of consonant sounds in words that are close together.

Example: Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. How many pickled peppers did Peter Piper pick?

Onomatopoeia

Words whose sounds suggest their meaning.

Example: Pop, whizz, sizzle, snap, crackle, boom, etc.

Hyperbole

Involves an exaggeration of ideas for the sake of emphasis.