Sounds, Figures, and Movement: Basic Tools of the Poet

Sounds: The poet chooses words for sound as well as for meaning. Verbal music is one of the important resources that enable the poet to do something more than communicate mere information. Essential elements in all music are repetition and variation.

Alliteration: the repetition of initial identical consonant or vowel sounds in successive or closely associated syllables, especially stressed syllables (see Meter, below).

Assonance: the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds in a sequence of nearby words. (Example: stone and holy)

Consonance: the repetition of a sequence of two or more consonants, but with a change in the intervening vowel sound. (Example: live and love, lean and alone, pitter and patter)

End Rhyme: a rhyme that occurs at the end of a line.

Internal Rhyme: a rhyme that occurs within a verse line.

False Rhyme: also called “off rhyme,” this is when the poet gives the effect of rhyming two words which do not actually rhyme at all. (Example: weird and here)

Figures of Speech: Figures of speech are another way of adding extra dimensions to language. Broadly defined, a figure of speech is any way of saying something other than the ordinary way, and some rhetoricians have classified as many as 250 separate figures. Figurative language is language that cannot be taken literally.

Metaphor and simile: used as a means of comparing things that are essentially unlike; in simile the comparison is expressed by the use of some word or phrase such as like, as than, similar to, resembles or seems. (Example: My love is like a rose.) In metaphor the comparison is implied - that is, the figurative term is substituted for or identified with the literal term. (Example: My love is a rose.)

Personification: consists in giving the attributes of a human being to an animal, an object, or a concept. Closely related to personification is apostrophe, which consists in addressing someone absent or something non human as if it were alive and present and could reply to what is being said.

Synecdoche: a part of something used to signify the whole. (Example: ten head of cattle, all hands on deck.)

Metonymy: the literal term for a thing is applied to something closely related. (Example: the crown used to signify a king.)

Image: a literal or concrete representation of a sensory experience or of an object that can be known by one or more of the senses.

Symbol: a symbol may be roughly defined as something that means more than what it is. Image, metaphor, and symbol shade into each other and are sometimes difficult to distinguish. In general, however, an image means only what it is; a metaphor means something other than what it is; and a symbol means what it is and something more too.

Movement: Like song, like breathing, poetry moves. How it moves can depend on structures such as meter (as within forms like the sonnet), or can be left open by the poet’s need for expression, suspense, melody, or tone.

Enjambment: lines that don’t pause at the end, but carry the rhythm through to the next line.

End-stopped line: a line that pauses at the end of the line and does not carry through to the next line.

Caesura: a pause, either within a line or between lines.

Rhythm and Meter: The term rhythm refers to any wave like recurrence of motion or sound. Meter is the kind of rhythm we can tap our foot to. Metrical language is called verse; non metrical language is prose.

Foot: the metrical unit by which a line of poetry is measured; it usually consists of one stressed or accented ( ' ) and one or two unstressed or unaccented syllables ( - ).

Name of Foot Name of Meter Measure

iamb iambic - `

trochee trochaic ` -

anapest anapestic - - `

dactyl dactylic ` - -

spondee spondaic ` `

pyrrhus pyrrhic - -