Figurative Language
“Her love is like a red, red rose.” -Robert Burns
Simile
A group of lines in a poem; a poem paragraph.
Stanza
Giving living characteristics to non-living things.
Personification
Unrhymed poetic form consisting of 17 syllables arranged in three lines of 5, 7, and 5.
Haiku
The Raven
Edgar Allan Poe
“Hope is the thing with feathers.” -Emily Dickinson
Metaphor
The ordered pattern of repeating sounds at the end of each line of a poem.
Rhyme Scheme
The repetition of initial consonant sounds in words.
Alliteration
14-line poem with a specific pattern of rhyme.
Sonnet
Sonnet 73
William Shakespeare
“Here once the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard round the world.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hyperbole
A stanza made up of four lines of verse.
Quatrain
A person, place, object, action, or event intended to represent something more than its literal meaning.
Symbol
A 19-line poem with a specific structure of five tercets (three-line stanzas) and a final quatrain (four-line stanza).
Villanelle
The Paradox
Paul Laurence Dunbar
“Well, son, I’ll tell you: Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.” -Langston Hughes
Imagery
The overall structure of a poem.
Form
The voice of the poem.
Speaker
A short lyric poem that celebrates or praises a person, place, event, idea, or season.
Ode
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Dylan Thomas
Oh, the bells, bells, bells! What a tale their terror tells Of Despair! How they clang, and clash, and roar! -Edgar Allan Poe
Onomatopoeia
The pattern of stresses and unstressed syllables in a line, creating a rhythm.
Meter
The repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or lines.
Anaphora
Poetry that does not rhyme or have a regular meter.
Free Verse
The Man He Killed
Thomas Hardy