The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (51 page)

rising rhythm
Metre whose primary movement is from unstressed to stressed, iambs and anapaests for example.

rondeau
Closed French form with various English guises.
R-aabba aabR aabbaR
seems to be the most common form, where
R
is the first half of the opening line. ‘In Flanders Fields’ by John McCrea is a well-known example of this kind of
r
.

rondeau redoublé
Variation of
rondeau
q.v. where the last lines of each stanza become refrain lines for the following stanzas. See the ‘More Closed French Forms’ section of Chapter Three.

rondel
Another French
rentrement
form. Check it out in Chapter Three, as above.

rondel prime
Ditto basically.

rondelet
And again.

rondine
The name of Shiraz’s sister in
Footballer’s Wives
. No, but shush at once.

roundel
Swinburne’s name for his adaptation of one or other of the French letter-R forms.

roundelay
Refrained verse of some bloody kind.

Rubai, ruba’iat, ruba’iyat
At last, sense.
Quatrain
verse of Persian origin, rhyming
aaba
,
ccdc
etc.

salad
Summery vegetable assemblage not to be confused with
ballad
or
ballade
q.v. Often contains
tomatoes
q.v.

Sapphic metre
In classical verse, a hendecasyllabic line composed of a
trochee
, an
anceps
, a
dactyl
, a
trochee
and a
spondee
.

Sapphic Ode
A stanza of three lines in Sapphic metre as above, followed by an Adonic line. The English stress-based adaptation as seen in Pope and others is usually in iambic pentameter or tetrameter with an iambic dimeter instead of a true Adonic.

Satanic School
Southey’s petulant name for poets like Byron, Shelley and Leigh Hunt who were better than he was and had more integrity.

scazon
Substitution of a ternary foot for a binary. See
choliamb
.

schwa
The phonetic character
that stands for a scudded
uh
sound, as in the weak vowel sounds in words like act
and comm
n and gramm
.

scop
Old English or Nordic storyteller, bard or poet.

Scriblerus, Martin
Group pseudonym under which satirical verses were published in the eighteenth century. Prominent members included Swift and Pope. Also known as the Scriblerus Club.

scud
To skip lightly over a syllable imparting no stress.

sdrucciolo
Cool word for
triple-rhyme
.

semantics
The study of linguistic meaning.

semeion
A basic metrical unit, either stressed or unstressed.

semiotics, semiology
The study of linguistic (and by extension social, cultural etc.) signs. The base study in structuralism, formalism, Saussurian linguistics, Lévi-Strauss-style social anthropology etc.

senryu, senriu
A
haiku
that is more about people than nature.

septain
A stanza of seven lines.

sestet
A stanza of six lines; also the final six lines of a (usually) Petrarchan sonnet.

sestina
A closed verse form in six stanzas and an envoi determined by rules of some complexity. See the section devoted to it in Chapter Three.

Shakespearean sonnet
The native English sonnet form adapted by Drayton, Sidney and others which found its apotheosis at the hands of Will. It rhymes
abab cdcd efef gg
.

shaped poem
See
pattern
poems.

shasei
The ‘sketch of nature’ that a
haiku
is supposed to render.

Skeltonics
Merry, rather clumsy subversive and scurrilous irregular verses, named after John S. (fifteenth–sixteenth-century English poet). Sometimes called
tumbling
verse.

slam
Originally Chicagoan poetry contests or public recitals of verse held as entertainment events.

slant-rhyme
See
partial
rhyme.

song that luc bat
A version of
luc bat
.

sonnet
A poem of fourteen lines, usually following a particular scheme, e.g. Petrarchan, Shakespearean, Spenserian or variations thereof.

sonnet of sonnets
A sequence of fourteen sonnets.

sonnet redoublé
A fifteen-poem
corona
sequence in which the fifteenth is made of the last lines of the previous fourteen. Something to do between lunch and tea.

Spenserian sonnet
Close to Shakespearean s., but with vestigial Petrarchan internal couplets:
abab bcbc cdcd ee.

Spenserian stanza
An open stanzaic form in iambic pentameter developed by Spenser for
The Faerie Queen
and later used by Keats and Tennyson. It rhymes
ababbcbcc
and features a final line in iambic hexameter, an
alexandrine
.

spondee
A metrical unit of two stressed feet. Or long feet if you’re an ancient Greek.

sprung rhythm
A phrase coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins to describe verse in which only the stresses are counted. See the section on it towards the end of Chapter One.

stand
A place to put a cake.
Or
, Ben Jonson’s word for
epode
.

stanza, stanzaic
What a verse is to a hymn or song, so a
stanza
is to a poem.

stave
Sometimes used to refer to a
stanza.

stichic
Of or in
lines
: how a poem is presented as distinct to prose. Christopher Ricks once said the real defining difference between prose and poetry was that whereas prose
has
to go to the end of a line, with poetry it’s an option. Reductive logic at its best.

stichomythia
Verse presented as dialogue, often rapidly alternating between speakers. In verse drama refers to dialogue of single lines rather than speeches.

stress
The feeling that comes upon an author when he knows he must deliver a book to his publisher when it isn’t quite finished yet and there’s a glossary to be completed.

strophe
The first part of a Pindaric Ode’s
triad
. What Jonson called the
turn
.

substitutions
The use of an alien metric foot in a line of otherwise regular metrical pattern.
Pyrrhic
and
trochaic
substitutions are common in iambic verse, for example.

suspension of disbelief
Term coined by Coleridge to describe a reader’s willingness to accept as true what clearly is not.

syllable, syllabic
The basic sound unit of a word. Come on, you know perfectly well. Of poetry it refers to forms that are predicated on their syllabic count rather than any metric considerations. The
haiku
and the
tanaga
, for example.

syllepsis
Kind of
zeugma
q.v. where a verb governs two unlikely nouns or phrases: as in ‘he left in a cab and a temper’, and Pope’s ‘Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade’.

synaeresis
A gliding of two syllables into one: in the opening line of
Paradise Lost
‘Of man’s first
disobedience
and the fruit’
d
becomes the four-syllable ‘disobedyence’. Also called
synaloepha
.

synaloepha
Look up at the preceding entry.

syncope
The
elision
of a syllable from a word: ‘prob’ly’ for ‘probably’ etc.

synecdoche
A figure of speech in which the part stands in for the whole or vice versa: e.g. ‘England won the Ashes’ where ‘England’ means the English Cricket XI, ‘twenty hands’, where ‘hand’ stands for a crewman etc.

syzygy
High score at Scrabble that means a pair of connected or corresponding things. Two hemistichs make a syzygy, you might say, or a plug and a socket together. In poetics also refers to multiple alliteration and consonance, as in the Ms in Tennyson’s ‘The moan of doves in immemorial elms/And murmuring of innumerable bees’ (from ‘The Princess’).

tanaga
A syllabic Filipino verse form.

tanka
A syllabic Japanese cinquain form of verse. The count is 5-7-5-7-7.

telestich
An
acrostic
where it is the last letters that do the spelling out.

teleuton
The terminating element of a line.

tercet
A three-line stanza.

ternary
A foot composed of three metrical elements.
Anapaest, dactyl, amphimacer
etc.

terza rima
An open stanzaic form with interlocking cross-rhyming. Used by Dante for his
Inferno
.