The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

anaphora

Rhetorical or poetic repetition of the first word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or stanzas.

anceps

A metrical unit that can be either short or long, stressed or unstressed according to the poet’s whim. Only really found in classical verse, such as quantitative imitations of Sappho etc.

anthology

Collection of poems, literally of flowers–a posy of poesy, in fact.

antimetabole

Rhetorical repetition by inversion and chiasmus q.v.–e.g. ‘I pretty and my saying apt? or ‘I apt and my saying pretty?’ from Love’s Labour’s Lost.

antiphon

Sung verse. antistrophe The ‘counter-turn’, used as the second part of a triad in Pindaric Odes.

aphaeresis, aphaeretic

The omission of a syllable at the beginning of a word: ’gainst, ’neath etc.

aphorism

Wise saying, often witty. Like an epigram but with a more universal truth. An epigram could be made about the appearance of a particular bride at a wedding, say, but this would not be an aphorism unless its wit and truth held for any occasion.

apocope, apocopation

An elision or omission of the final letter or syllable of a word, ‘i’the’ for ‘in the’, ‘seld’ for ‘seldom’ and the Chaucerian ‘bet’ for ‘better’ etc.

apostrophe

Aside from the obvious reference to a punctuation mark, a moment when a poet turns to address some person, object or principle, often preceded by a (pro)vocative ‘O’, as in ‘O attic shape!’ as Keats liked to say to his favourite Grecian urns.

apothegm

A short aphorism, q.v.

assonance, assonantal

A repetition of vowel sounds either used internally, or as a partial rhyme q.v. ‘Most holy Pope’, ‘slurred first words’, etc.

asyndeton, asyndetic

The omission of conjunctions, personal pronouns and other particles: ‘hoping see you tomorrow’, ‘not fond turkey, prefer goose,’ etc.

aubade

A poetic celebration of dawn or a lament at daybreak’s interference with lovers and their private bliss e.g. Romeo and Juliet: ‘But soft what light at yonder window breaks?’, Donne’s ‘The Sun Rising’ etc. Also called an alba.

ballad

Traditional verse form, often sung, usually in four-stress cross-rhyming quatrains, often alternating with three-stress lines. Not to be confused with ballade or salad q.v.

ballade

Verse form of three stanzas, three rhymes and envoi: ababbabA ababbabA ababbabA babA.

bang, bang, bang–crash!

Michael Alexander’s phrase describing the alliterative principle behind Anglo-Saxon verse. Three alliterated stresses followed by a non-alliterated one.

bathos, bathetic

A (comic or pathetic) failure to achieve dignity, a banal anticlimax.

binary

A metrical foot of two units: iambic, trochaic, spondaic or pyrrhic.

blank verse

Non-rhyming verse: most often applied to iambic pentameter, such as that found in Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Wordsworth’s The Prelude.

burden

A refrain, q.v.

cadence

Lit. ‘falling’, the natural rhythm derived from accentuation, i.e. the rise and fall of stress. The sound that precedes a pause. caesura Of metrical verse: a pause or breath in mid line.

canto

A series of long poems.

canzone

A lyric poem, usually with envoi.

catalexis, catalectic

Truncation: the docking of a final metrical unit, such as the last feminine syllable of a trochaic line.

cataplexis, cataplectic

Hardly relevant, but a fun word. It means a poetical or rhetorical threatening of punishment, horror or disaster. Like King Lear’s ‘I will do such things, What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be The terrors of the earth’.

cauda, caudate sonnet

Lit. tail. A three-line coda to a sonnet, consisting of a trimeter and two pentameters.

cento

A collage poem made up of lines of real verse from different poems.

chant royal

A sixty-line poem with envoi. I spared you it in Chapter Three out of care for your sanity.

chiasmus

From the Gr. letter chi, meaning a ‘crossing’ of sense. A common rhetorical figure, ‘It’s not the men in my life, it’s the life in my men’, ‘one should eat to live, not live to eat’, ‘Real pain for sham friends, Champagne for real friends’ etc.

choliamb

A scazon q.v.–kind of metrical substitution, usually with ternary feet replacing binary. Forget about it.

chronogram

A gematric q.v. poem or motto whose letters when added as Roman numerals make up a significant number, such as a date: e.g. Lord have mercie vpon vs = 1666 (or 1464 or permutations thereof ).

cinquain

A stanza of five lines. Esp. in reference to the verse of Adelaide Crapsey.