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Poem Vocabulary

Terms in this set (14)

Let it Be, by The Beatles
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.
Alliteration
When a series of words in a row (or close together) have the same first consonant sound
"Poetry is old, ancient, goes back far. It is
among the oldest of living things. So old it is that no man knows how and why the first poems came."
- Early Moon by Carl Sandburg
Assonance
The repetition of vowel sounds in nearby words. It is used to reinforce the meanings of words or to set the mood.
"Rap rejects my tape deck, ejects projectile
Whether Jew or gentile, I rank top percentile
Many styles, more powerful than gamma rays
My grammar pays, like Carlos Santana plays."

- Zealots by The Fugees
Consonance
Repetitive sounds produced by consonants within a sentence or phrase
Preludes by T.S. Eliot
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
Imagery
Words that create a mental image in the reader's mind.
Words that incorporate the five senses (sight, sound, taste, smell, touch).
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

- Harlem by Langston Hughes
Simile
Comparing two things, using like or as
...and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you ..."

--e.e. Cummings, i carry your heart with me
Metaphor
Comparing two things, WITHOUT using like or as
"When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."

- I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud by William Wordsworth
Personification
The representation of a thing or a quality as a person; giving human characteristics to inhuman objects/ideas
Once she spilled my chocolate malt
and told my mom it was all my fault.
End Rhyme
Rhyme that concludes a line or stanza.
Lay down these words
before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Internal Rhyme
Rhyme found within a line
The measured pattern of rhythmic accents in poems.
Meter
A metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, an iamb or iambic foot is represented by ˘ ', that is, an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one.
Foot
A group of lines in a poem
Couplet, Tercet, Quatrain, Sestet, Octave are the most common formal stanzas
Stanza
As I in hoary winter's night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat, which made my heart to glow;
End Stop
A line of poetry that ends with a period or the feeling of a period
That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
looking as if she were alive. I call
that piece a wonder, now....
A run-on line of poetry in which logical and grammatical sense carries over from one line into the next.
Enjambment
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