Poetry UnitGo Bulldogs!

Essential Questions

What does it mean to overcome adversity?

How can others help us see life in a different way?

In what way do the choices we make change the direction of our lives?

Simile

SimileA figure of speech involving a comparison between unlike things using like, as, or as though.

An example: "My love is like a red, red rose.“

Metaphor

A comparison between essentially unlike things without an explicitly comparative word such as like or as.

An example is "My love is a red, red rose,“

From Burns's "A Red, Red Rose." Langston Hughes's "Dream Deferred" is built entirely of metaphors. Metaphor is one of the most important of literary uses of language.

Shakespeare employs a wide range of metaphor in his sonnets and his plays, often in such density and profusion that readers are kept busy analyzing, interpreting and unraveling them.

Rhetorical Question

A rhetorical question is a figure of speech in the form of a question that is asked in order to make a point.

The question, a rhetorical device, is posed not to elicit a specific answer, but rather to encourage the listener to consider a message or viewpoint

A common example is the question "Can't you do anything right?". This question, when posed, is intended not to ask about the listener's abilities, but rather to insinuate a lack of the listener's abilities.

In simple terms, it is a question asked more to produce an effect than to summon an answer

Repetition

Repetition of a sound, syllable, word, phrase, line, stanza, or metrical pattern is a basic unifying device in all poetry.

Because I do not hope to turn againBecause I do not hopeBecause I do not hope to turn....

Parallelism

Parallelism refers to the repetition of sentence structure or word order to achieve a rhythmical effect.

The overall effect is that sentence parts

seem to rhyme.

More importantly, the thoughts that these parts express are either repeated or contrasted.

Alliteration

The repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the beginning of words.

Example: "Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood." Hopkins, "In the Valley of the Elwy.“

Rhyme Scheme

A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhyme between lines of a poem or song.

It is usually referred to by using letters to indicate which lines rhyme; lines designated with the same letter all rhyme with each other. Therefore, it is the pattern of end rhymes or lines.

Bid me to weep, and I will weep While I have eyes to see; And having none, yet I will keep A heart to weep for thee. A

B A B

Personification

The endowment of inanimate objects or abstract concepts with animate or living qualities.

An example: "The yellow leaves flaunted their color gaily in the breeze."

Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" includes personification.

Symbolism

An object or action in a literary work that means more than itself, that stands for something beyond itself.

The glass unicorn in The Glass Menagerie, the rocking horse in "The Rocking-Horse Winner," the road in Frost's "The Road Not Taken"--all are symbols in this sense.

Free Verse

Poetry without a regular pattern of meter or rhyme.

The verse is "free" in not being bound by earlier poetic conventions requiring poems to adhere to an explicit and identifiable meter and rhyme scheme in a form such as the sonnet or ballad.

Modern and contemporary poets of the

twentieth and twenty-first centuries often employ free verse. Williams's "This Is Just to Say" is one of many examples.

Haiku

Haiku is a Japanese poetry form. A haiku uses just a few words to capture a moment and create a picture in the reader's mind. It is like a tiny window into a scene much larger than itself.

Traditionally, haiku is written in three lines, with five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second line, and five syllables in the third line.

Haiku examples Here's a haiku poem written by a poetry student:

The last winter leavesClinging to the black branchesExplode into birds.

Stanza

A Stanza consists of two or more lines of poetry that together form one of the divisions of a poem.

The stanzas of a poem are usually of the same length and follow the same pattern of meter and rhyme and are used like paragraphs in a story.

I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there's a pair of us! Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know! How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one's name – the livelong June To an admiring Bog!

Lines

a single line of words in a poem line of verse

I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there's a pair of us! Don't tell! they'd advertise – you

know! How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one's

name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!

Limerick short, humorous or nonsense poem, humorous five-line anapestic meter with a strict rhyme scheme (AABBA)

The first two lines rhyme with the last line and the third and fourth line rhyme, and they are usually shorter.

The form can be found in England as of the early years of the 18th century.[2] It was popularized by Edward Lear in the 19th century,[3] although he did not use the term.

The following limerick is of unknown origin:

There was a Young Person of Smyrna Whose grandmother threatened to burn her. But she seized on the cat,and said 'Granny, burn that! You incongruous old woman of Smyrna!' ]

Allegory

A symbolic narrative in which the surface details imply a secondary meaning. Allegory often takes the form of a story in which the characters represent moral qualities.

The most famous example in English is John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, in which the name of the central character, Pilgrim, epitomizes the book's allegorical nature.

Kay Boyle's story "Astronomer's Wife" and Christina Rossetti's poem "Up-Hill" both contain allegorical elements.

Assonance

Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance serves as one of the building blocks of verse.

Assonance is a rhyme, the identity of which depends merely on the vowel sounds. Thus, an assonance is merely a syllabic resemblance.

Dissonance

A disruption of harmonic sounds or rhythms

Dissonance is usually intentional, however, and depends more on the organization of sound for a jarring effect, rather than on the unpleasantness of individual words.

Ballad

Ballad Poems are poems that tells a story similar to a folk tale or legend and often has a repeated refrain. A ballad is often about love and often sung. A ballad is a story in poetic form.

Blank verse

A line of poetry or prose in unrhymed iambic pentameter.

Shakespeare's sonnets, Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, and Robert Frost's meditative poems such as "Birches" include many lines of blank verse.

Here are the opening blank verse lines of "Birches": When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees, / I like to think some boy's been swinging them.

Couplet A pair of rhymed lines that may or may not

constitute a separate stanza in a poem.

Shakespeare's sonnets end in rhymed couplets, as in "For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings."

And miles to go before I sleep,And miles to go before I sleep.