The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (49 page)

common metre
ballad
metre, i.e. 4-3-4-3, rhyming
abab
or
abcb

conceit
An extended metaphor or fanciful image.

connotation
The associative, implied meaning of a word, as opposed to its
denotation
q.v.

consonance
A loose or exact repetition of consonant sounds either used internally, or as partial rhyme. ‘And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old’,
fuck/fork
,
pushing/passion
,
past the post
etc.

corona sequence
A sonnet sequence where the last line of a sonnet is used as the first line of the next. The final sonnet will end with the opening line of the first in the sequence.

coronach
A
threnody
or funeral dirge.

counter-turn
Ben Jonson’s word for
antistrophe
q.v.

couplet
A pair of rhyming lines.

cretic
Alternative name for the
amphimacer
q.v., after the Cretan poet Thaletas.

cross-rhyme
End-rhyming of alternate lines:
abab cdcd
etc.

curtal
Name for a
sonnet
that falls short of the usual fourteen lines, if such a thing can be said to exist. Properly speaking, the Hopkins stanza with an octave reduced to a sestet.

cynghanedd
From Welsh poetry, a style of interlaced
alliteration
: as employed by Hopkins.

dactyl
Ternary
foot.
, or long-short-short in classical prosody.

denotation
The strict, literal meaning of a word, stripped of its
connotation
q.v., colour, suggestion, implications etc.

diacritic -al
A sign, such as an accent or cedilla, that goes above or below a letter to indicate a change in pronunciation.

diamante
Wretchedly silly diamond-shaped verse form in which one word becomes its opposite or antithesis according to pointless rules that I can’t be bothered to go into again.

diction
In poetry, the choice of words. The discourse, frame of reference, atmosphere, coloration and other aspects of word choice are all elements of poetic
d
.

didactic
Lit. ‘teaching’–writing that intends (usu. moral) instruction.

dieresis
Diacritical
mark–the two dots used to show that a
diphthong
’s vowel sounds should be pronounced separately, ‘Noël’, ‘naïve’; etc. In metre, a word meaning a natural
caesura
(i.e. one that does not break a word or clause).

dimeter
A verse line of two metric feet.

diminishing rhyme
A rhyme scheme where each new rhyme takes a syllable or letter less than its predecessor:
promotion
,
emotion, motion, ocean
and
passing, arsing, sing
etc.

diphthong
Two vowels together.

dipodic
Composed of two feet (as most humans are).

dirge
A mourning, wailing lament.

dithyramb, dithyrambic
Wild choral Dionysiac celebratory verse. Often used to describe overblown poetic
diction
q.v.

divine afflatus
(Now mock comic) phrase used to describe poetic inspiration.

dramatic monologue
(Non theatrical) verse in the voice of a character, often addressing another imaginary character or the reader him/herself. ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘Andrea del Sarto’, sections of
The Waste Land
etc.

eclogue
From Virgil, pastoral poem.

elegiac
Of mourning. The elegiac quatrain
abab
in iambic pentameter was developed by Thomas Gray for his country churchyard.

elision
The omission of words or parts of words.

encomium
Praise song or ode for a (usu. living) person.

endecasíllabo
Italian name for a
hendecasyllabic
line of iambic pentameter.

end-rhyming
The rhyming of final words, or final stressed syllables in lines of verse. Usual rhyming, in fact.

end-stopped
Lines of verse which do not run on in sense, but whose thought ends with the line. Lines without
enjambment
q.v.

enjambment
The running-on of sense over the end of a line of verse. Verse that is not
end-stopped
q.v.

entry
Just testing to see whether you had got to
q.v.
q.v. yet.

envelope rhyme
A couplet nested in two outer rhymes, as in
abba
.

envoi
A short stanza of summation or conclusion at the end of a poem. Found in certain closed forms, such as the
sestina
and
ballade
q.q.v.

epanalepsis
General word for repetition or resumption of a theme.

epanaphora
Extreme
anaphora
q.v. As in Wendy Cope’s ‘My Lover’ in which every line begins with the word ‘For’.

epanodos
Recapitulation and expansion of an image or idea.

epigram
Memorably witty remark, saying or observation.

epistrophe
Repetition at the end of clauses or sentences: ‘When I was a child, I spake as I child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child’ etc.

epithalamium
A poem celebrating a wedding: nuptial or hymeneal verse. No specific formal requirements. Much the same as
prothalamium
to be honest.

epode
The third part of the
Pindaric Ode
’s triad. Called by Jonson the
stand
.

esemplastic
Rather fine word coined by Coleridge to describe an unlike imaginative union of two qualities or things.

expletive
A word or words used to fill the metrical requirements of a line. The iambic pentameter ‘He thus did sit him down upon the rock’, is saying no more than ‘he sat on the rock’, the other five words are expletives.

fabliau
A (sometimes comic) tale, originally medieval French, now applied to any short moral fable in verse or prose.

falling rhythm
Metre whose primary movement is from stressed to unstressed, dactylic and trochaic verse, for example.

false friend
Word or phrase whose meaning is confused with other words or phrases (often from another language) which sound similar. ‘To meld’ is used often to mean to ‘fuse’ or ‘unite’ through false friendship with ‘melt’ and ‘weld’–it actually means ‘to announce’. Similarly ‘willy-nilly’ is used to mean ‘all over the place’ where in reality it means ‘whether you like it or not’, i.e. ‘willing or unwilling’. Only sad pedants like me care about these misuses which are now common enough to be almost correct.

feedback
See
loop
.

feminine ending
An unstressed ending added to an iamb, anapaest or other usually rising foot.
Hanging
,
waiter
,
television
etc.

feminine rhyme
The rhyming of feminine-ended words. The rhyme is always on the last stressed syllable. Rhymes for the above could be
banging
,
later
,
derision
.

fescennine
Indecent or scurrilous verse.

filidh
An Irish bard.

foot
A metrical division: five feet to a
pentameter
, four to a
tetrameter
etc.

fourteeners
Iambic heptameter. Seven iambs make fourteen syllables.

free verse
Verse that follows no conventional form, rhyming scheme or metrical pattern.

ghazal
Middle Eastern couplet form following special rules as described in Chapter Three.

gematri-a, -ic
(Originally Kabbalistic) assignation of numerical value to letters–as in
chronogram
q.v.

glyconic
Latin style of verse usu. with three trochees and a dactyl.

haijin
A
haiku
practitioner.

haikai (no renga)
The ancestor of
haiku
. Playful linked Japanese verse developed from the
waka
in the sixteenth century.

haiku
Three-line verses (in English at least) with a syllable count of 5-7-5 and adhering to certain thematic principles.

hemistich
A half-line of verse: the term is most often found in reference to Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry.

hendecasyllabic
Composed of eleven syllables.

hendiadys
Lit. ‘one through two’: a trope where a single idea is expressed by two nouns where usually it would be a qualified or modified noun: ‘nice and warm’ for ‘nicely warm’, ‘sound and fury’ for ‘furious sound’. Also phrase where ‘and’ replaces infinitive ‘to’ as in ‘try and behave’ for ‘try to behave’.

heptameter
A line of verse in seven metrical feet.
Fourteeners
, for example.

heroic couplets
Rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter.

heroic line
Iambic pentameter.

heroic verse
Poetry cast in heroic couplets.

hexameter
A line of verse in six metrical feet.

hokku
The opening verse of
haikai
, from which the
haiku
is descended.

homeoteleuton
Repetition of words ending in like syllables: e.g. ‘readable intelligible syllables are horrible’, ‘a little fiddle in a pickle’ etc.

homostrophic
Arrangement of identically structured stanzas, esp. as in
Horatian
and other ode forms.

Horatian Ode
Ode in the manner of the Roman poet Horace, adopted, adapted, translated and imitated in English verse esp. in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Hudibrastic
Used to describe the kind of tortured polysyllabic rhyming found in Samuel Butler’s mock-epic
Hudibras
.

hypermetric
A line with an extra syllable. Technically, a hendecasyllabic line of pentameter is hypermetric.

hypermonosyllabic
Optional
synaeresis
q.v. A word that can be sounded with either one or two syllables, i.e. ‘réal’, ‘flówer’ and ‘líar’ (can be said as ‘reel’, ‘flour’ and ‘lyre’).

ictus
The unit of stress within a foot. The second element in an
iamb
, the first in a
trochee
, the third in an
anapaest
etc.

idyll
A short pictorial poem, chiefly lyrical or pastoral: ‘idyllic’ is often now used to mean ‘ideal’ and ‘perfect’.

internal rhyme
Oh for heaven’s sake it’s obvious, isn’t it?
inversion
Reversal of usual sentence structure. ‘Happy am I’, etc.

jeu d’esprit
Merry word play or similar gamesome larkiness.

kenning
A Norse and Anglo-Saxon metaphorical or metonymic yoking of words, such as ‘whale road’ for sea.

kigo
The ‘season word’ placed in a
haiku
to tell the reader in which time of year the verse is set.

tomato
A red savoury fruit sometimes known as a love-apple which has a place in many sauces and salads but none whatever in a glossary of poetical terms. Especially when it has not been inserted in the correct alphabetical order.

kireji
The caesura that should occur in the first or second line of a
haiku
.