The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (50 page)

kyrielle
A
refrain
verse form descended from an element of Catholic mass.

lay
Narrative poem or short song.

leonine rhyme
Internal rhyming in verse of long measure where the word preceding the caesura rhymes with the end-word.

limerick
You know perfectly well.

lineation
The arrangement of lines in a poem, how they break and how their length is ordered. Prescribed in metrical verse but at the poet’s discretion in free verse. See
stichic
.

lipograms
Verse or writing where for some reason best known to himself the poet has decided to omit one letter throughout. As I have unquestionably done with the letter q here. Damn.

litotes
Understatement for comic effect, often cast in negatives to indicate a positive: ‘a not unsatisfactory state of affairs’ for ‘a splendid outcome’ etc. Same as
meiosis
q.v.

loop
See
feedback
.

luc bat
A Vietnamese form described in Chapter Three.

lyric ode
An open form of rhymed, stanzaic verse, usually in iambic pentameter, descended as much from the
sonnet
as from the
Horatian Ode
. Used to describe the odes of Keats and other romantic poets.

majuscule
Capital letters. Upper Case.

masculine ending
A stressed word end.

masculine rhyme
The rhyming of same.

meiosis
Cell division to a biologist, understatement to a grammarian. Often comical. See
litotes
.

melon
Sweet pleasant fruit. What possible reason can it have for being in this glossary? Andrew Marvell stumbled on them as he passed, but otherwise they have no business being here. Please ignore this entry.

melopoeia
Word coined by Ezra Pound to describe the overall soundscape of a poem.

mesostich
Halfway point of a line–used to apply to acrostics that descend therefrom.

metaphor
Figurative use of a word or phrase to describe something to which it is not literally applicable. ‘The ship ploughed through the waves’, ‘Juliet is the sun’, ‘there’s April in her eyes’ etc.

metonym
A metaphoric trope in which a word or phrase is used to stand in for what it represents: ‘the bottle’ is a metonym for ‘drinking’, ‘the stage’ for ‘theatrical life’, ‘Whitehall’ for the civil service etc.
Kennings
q.v. and
synecdoche
are often metonymic.

minuscule
non capital letters. lower case.

molossus
A ternary foot of three long, or stressed, units. ‘Short sharp shock’, etc.

monody
Ode or dirge sung or declaimed by a single individual.

monometer
A metric line of one foot.

monosyllable
Let me say this in words of one sill ab uhl.

mora
From Lat. for ‘delay’. In syllable-timed languages the duration of one short syllable. Two
morae
make a long syllable. Equivalent of crotchet and minim in music.

Muses
Nine multi-domiciled girls (the daughters of
Mnemosyne
or Memory) who shuttle between Pieria, Parnassus and Mount Helicon and give poets and others inspiration.
Erato
helps us with our Love Poetry,
Calliope
with our epics,
Melpomene
with our tragedies,
Polyhymnia
is good for sacred verse and
Thalia
for comedy. For non-poets
Clio
looks after History and
Renault
motor cars,
Euterpe
is in charge of music,
Terpsichore
is the dance mistress and
Urania
teaches astronomy.

near rhyme
Echoic devices such as
assonance
,
consonance
and
homeoteleuton
q.q.v

negative capability
Keats’s phrase (used in a letter of 1818 and referring to Shakespeare after being inspired by Kean’s performance as Richard III) ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. A phrase now used to describe the poetic ability to efface self and take on the qualities being described.

nonce word
A word coined for use on one occasion:
not
a nonsense word–that would be a false friend q.v.

nonet
No, no. Silly verse form of ascending or diminishing syllabic count.

numbers
A now archaic word for lines of verse.

objective correlative
Phrase coined by T. S. Eliot in a 1919 essay on
Hamlet
to refer to the context of an emotion, the pattern of events, diction etc. leading to an emotional response. Now often used to mean the poet’s intended emotional effect. Eliot felt that
Hamlet
lacked an o. c.

octameter
A metric line of eight feet.

octave
The first eight lines of a (usually Petrarchan or Petrarchan variant) sonnet.

ode
Verse form on one theme, now usually applied to lyric poems.

Old English
Anglo-Saxon (approx. fifth–twelfth century). Applies to four-stress hemistichal alliterative accentual verse, e.g.
Beowulf
.

onomatopoei-a, -ic
Of words whose sounds imitate their meaning: e.g. ‘click’, ‘hiss’, ‘susurration’ etc.

open form
Metrical rhymed verse where issues like the number of stanzas are not fixed, but up to the poet.

ottava rima
An open form of eight-line verse rhyming
abababcc
. Byron’s
Don Juan
, late Yeats etc.

oxymoron
Lit. ‘sharp blunt’ a contradictory phrase: as in
Romeo and Juliet
’s ‘O loving hate! O heavy lightness!’, or a paradoxical phrase such as ‘eloquent silence’, ‘living death’ or ‘military intelligence’ (ho-ho).

paean
A song of praise, encomium.

palilogy
Repetition–what a lot of words for it there are.

panegyric
Writing in praise of a character’s specific qualities or achievements.

pantoum
Malayan closed form with refrained lines. See Chapter Three.

paragram
To hide a name or word inside text. ‘A cut and pa
STEPHEN
omenon’, or’
S
ui
T
abl
E P
oetic
H
idd
EN
word’.

paralepsis
To say something while pretending not to: ‘I shall not mention his appalling table manners’ etc.

para-rhyme
Partial rhyme, assonance or consonance rhyming, for example,
head/bet, foul/stout, feel/full
. Also called
slant-rhyme
or
off-rhyme
.

parody
Imitation of the style of another.

paronomasia
Wordplay, punning.

particle
Small word like a conjunction (and, or, but), preposition (for, of, with, by), pronoun (they, his, me, who, that) and so on.

pathetic fallacy
John Ruskin’s term for the romantic attribution of life and a soul to inanimate objects or principles, Nature esp.

pattern poem
A poem whose physical shape on the page represents an object of some kind. Same as shaped poetry.

pentameter
A metrical line of five feet.

periphrasis
A roundabout way of speaking, circumlocution.

Petrarchan sonnet
A sonnet form adapted from Petrarch’s original cycle of poems to his Laura: the octave rhymes
abba abba
and the sestet in English can be anything from the original
cdecde
to
cdcdcd
,
cdcdee
and other variations.

phaleucian
A Greek metre consisting of a spondee, dactyl and three trochees.

phanopoeia
Name Pound gave to Imagism in action–a revelatory or reified image.

phoneme
Base unit of sound.

Pindaric Ode
From the Greek poet Pindar; celebratory or praise songs that developed into formal
triadic
odes in English.

pleonasm
Tautology, use of redundant words, unnecessary repetition–as in this entry. Not to be confused with ‘neoplasm’ which means a morbid new growth or tissue.

poesie, poesy
Now poncey word for poetry.

polyptoton
Repetition of the same word, but using different endings and inflexions e.g. ‘It’s socially unacceptable in society to socialise with an unsociable socialist’ etc.

prosody
The art of versification: the very subject of this magnificent little book.

prothalamium
An
epithalamium
, specifically one to be recited before entry into the bridal chamber (Spenser).

pyrrhic
A binary foot of two unstressed units.

quantitative
Of quantity. A word’s quantity is the sum of its vowel lengths. In quantitative verse, feet are not elements of stress but of sound duration (
morae
q.v.). ‘Smooth’ is long, ‘moth’ is short and so on. The stuff of classical verse, quantitative poetry was never much more than an experiment in the stress-timed English language. Longfellow’s
Evangeline
and Southey’s dactylic hexameters remain possibly the best-known examples.

Quarterly Review
Tory magazine begun in 1809. Shelley held a ‘homicidal article’ in it responsible for Keats’s early demise: ‘Who killed John Keats? I, said the Quarterly, So savage and Tartarly, ’Twas one of my feats.’ Byron adapted S’s squib in
Don Juan
(but see under
Cockney School
).

quaternary
Divided into four: in prosody this refers to metrical feet that have four units, such as the choriamb and the antispast.

quatorzain
Name given to a fourteen-line poem that is not considered by the prosodist or critic using the term to be a ‘true’ sonnet. A subjective matter, to be honest.

quatrain
A four-line stanza.

quintain
A five-line stanza, or
cinquain
.

q.v.
From Latin
quod vide
meaning ‘which see’ or ‘take a look at that one’, used in fancy glossaries like this to follow a word in the body of a definition which has its own
entry
q.v.

rann
A quatrain in Irish verse.

redondilla
Spanish verse cast in octosyllables.

refrain
Line repeated at set intervals within a song or poem.

reify, reification
To concretise the abstract, to embody an idea.

rentrement
Refrain
, burden or single-lined chorus.

repetend
Any word or phrase that is (to be) repeated.

rhadif
The
refrain
line of a
ghazal
.

rhapsody
The sung part of an epic or saga. Applied to moments of lyricism in otherwise non-lyric verse, i.e. the ‘Isles of Greece’ section in Byron’s
Don Juan.

rhopalic
Progression of words whereby each word is longer by one syllable than its predecessor.

rhopalics
Too silly to bother with.

rhyme royal, rime royal
An open stanza form following the scheme
ababbcc
. Chaucer’s
Troilus and Criseyde
and Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ are written in this form.

rhyme-scheme
The pattern of rhyming in a stanza or passage of verse,
abba abab, aa
etc represent various examples of r. s.

rich rhyme
The rhyming of words that either look and sound the same but have a different meaning (
homonyms
), ‘the
sound
is very
sound’, or
words that sound the same but look different, (
homophones
) like
blue/blew
or
praise/preys, >or
words that look the same but sound different, ‘he wore a
bow
and made a
bow
to the audience’ etc.

rictameter
See
rhopalics.

rime en kyrielle
Used to describe any
rentrement
q.v. or poetic refrain.

rime retournée
Backwards rhyme, but of
sound
not spelling: i.e. not
emit
and
time, Eros and sore
but
mite
or
might
and
time, Eros
and
sorry
etc.