Scansion
What foot is the word "iamb"?
trochee
Torvald Helmer
Sonnet
"On tabletops, desktops. You tapped every surface you found in front of you, listened for the sound things made back at you when you hit them. The timbre of taps, the din of dings, silverware clangs in kitchens, door knocks, knuckle cracks, head scratches. You were finding out that everything makes a sound."
Tommy Orange, There There
Thomas Frank
powwow drummer
Second person narration, consonance
What literary device does Tommy Orange use in the last sentence of this passage about Jacquie Red Feather in There There?
"Jacquie can't remember a day going by when at some point she hadn't wished she could burn her life down. Today actually, she hadn't had that thought today. That was was something. That was not nothing."
litotes
What two kinds of rhyme are found in the first four lines of William Blake's "Tyger"?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
end rhyme & slant rhyme
What is the name of Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield's teddy bear?
Two Shoes
This unrhymed three-line poem has a total of 17 syllables divided 5,7,5.
Haiku
"Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven
Whiles, a puffed and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Ophelia to Laertes
What literary device organizes this statement of Torvald Helmer's?
"I am saved! Nora, I am saved!"
diacope (repetition of a word or phrase with interruption) OR epimone (repetition of a phrase)
What is the meter of William Blake's "Tyger"?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Complete this line from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man:
"Call me _________________, for I am in a state of hibernation" (6).
Jack-the-Bear
This nineteen-line poem has five tercets and one quatrain and is rhymed ABA ABA ABA ABA ABA ABBA. Although it has nineteen lines, only thirteen of these are original lines because the first and third lines of the first tercet are repeated as the last lines of the following tercets and the first and last lines of the final quatrain.
villanelle
"Under the ice, perhaps? Down into the cold, coal-black water? And then, in the spring, to float up to the surface, all horrible and unrecognisable with your hair fallen out--
People don't do such things....Besides, what use would it be? I should have him completely in my power all the same."
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House
Nils Krogstad to Nora Helmer
What literary device is Ralph Ellison using in this passage of Invisible Man?
"Weren't we part of them as well as apart from them and subject to die when they died?"
polyptoton (the repetition of words derived form the same root but with different forms)
What foot & meter is Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade"?
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Dactylic Dimeter
Who is Darl describing in this passage from William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying?
"shutting off the horse's wind with one hand, with the other patting the horse's neck in short strokes myriad and caressing, cursing the horse with obscene ferocity" (12).
Jewel Bundren
Oscar Wilde is notorious for the following contributions to this form of clever pithy sayings:
"I can resist anything but temptation."
"Nothing worth knowing can be taught."
epigram
"Finally, one night, way early in the mornin', I looks up and sees the stars and I starts singin'. I don't mean to, I didn't think 'bout it, just start singin'. I don't know what it was, some kinda church song, I guess. All I know is I ends up singin' the blues. I sings me some blues that night ain't never been sang before, and while I'm singin' them blues I makes up my mind that i ain't nobody but myself and ain't nothin' I can do but let whatever is gonna happen, happen.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Trueblood
What literary device does Shakespeare use in this fragment of Hamlet's letter to Ophelia in Hamlet?
"Doubt thou the sars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love."
anaphora (the repetition of a word or wrods at the beginning of successive sentences or clauses)
What verse is written in iambic pentameter but without end rhymes?
Who speaks this line and to whom?
"I am no bird"
Jane Eyre to Edward Rochester
These haunting lines by Bertolt Brecht serve this function in Tommy Orange's There There:
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.
epigraph
"give orders that these bodies
High on a stage be placed in the view,
And let me speak to th'yet unknowing world
How these things came about. So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning, and for no cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Full'n on th'inventors' heads. All this can I
Truly deliver.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Horatio to Fortinbras
Bertolt Brecht's words, appearing at the beginning of Tommy Orange's "Prologue" to There There are organized by this literary device:
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.
chiasmus