POETRY
A poem is a
composition made of rhymes and rhythm.
- Accent: the prominence
or emphasis given to a syllable in a word.
- Alliteration: repetition of the same consonant sound
at the beginning of words.
- Anaphora: repetition of
the same word at the beginning of different verses.
- Antithesis: it consists
into contrasting or combining two terms, phrases, or clauses with opposed
or antithetical meanings.
- Assonance: repetition of vowel sounds within a short
passage of verse and with
different consonants.
- Beat: where the
accent fall on; it can be strong or weak
- Blank space: space that
divide two stanzas.
- Couplet: minim group of
lines.
- Enjambment: the breaking of
a syntactic unit (a phrase clause or sentence) by
the end of a line or between two verses; is a line ending in which the
syntax, the rhythm, and thought are continued in the subsequent line/s. It
is also called run-on-line.
- Free verse: unmetered and
often irregularly long, unrhymed verse that depends on variation in
rhythm, repetition, typographical or grammatical oddness to achieve its
effects. It tends to follow the flow of thoughts, refusing any constraint
or convention.
- Hyperbole: exaggeration.
- Image: basic device of
poetry used to illustrate an idea, an object or an action by appealing to
the senses.
- Internal: sound similar
to rhyme.
- Irony: stating
something by saying another quite different or opposite thing.
- Metaphor rhetorical trope defined as a
direct comparison between two
seemingly unrelated subjects. Typically, a first object is described as being
or having the properties of a second object. In this way, the first object
can be economically described because implicit and explicit attributes
from the second object can be used to fill in the description of the
first.
- Metonymy: substitution of
a word normally associated with something for the term that usually
meaning that thing (ex: "big-sky country" for Canada).
- Metre: artificial
manipulation of the rhythmic possibilities of the language.
- Onomatopoeia: imitation of
the sounds of the natural or real world through words that evoke them.
- Oxymoron: expression
impossible in fact but not necessarily self-contradictory.
- Paradox: rhetorical
figure of meaning used to state something through a self-contradictory phrase
or sentence.
- Parallelism: rhetorical
device in which words, phrases, or similar ideas share a similar
syntactical structure. This create an immediate comparison between them.
- Refrain: lines that are
repeated more than once inside a poem.
- Rhyme: repetition of
the same or similar ending sounds in the last word in two or more lines.
Rhyme schemes:
AABB couple rhyme
ABAB alternated
rhyme
ABBA enveloped or
enclosed
ABAC o ABCB unbounded or ballad
CDE CDE interlaced rhyme
- Rhythm: sense of
movement obtained by: line length (number of syllables), number of beat (where
the accent fall on and if it is strong or weak) and rhymes.
Simile figure of speech in which the subject
is compared to another subject; we have the comparison between attributes of
two different objects connected by the word "like" (between two names) or "as"
(if I compare two adjectives).
Syllables: can be from two to
fourteen.
Synecdoche: figure of meaning
where the part stands for the whole.
Synesthesia: the use of different
senses in describing something.
Stanza: group of lines
linked together into thematic, metrical, rhetorical or narrative sections.
POETRY GENRES
- Ballad: poem that tells
a story similar to a folk tale or legend and often has a repeated refrain.
- Dramatic monologue representing itself as a speech made by one person to a silent
listener, usually not the reader.
- Elegy: lament written
for a dead person.
- Free verse: typical of
modern poetry, it doesn't follow any rules.
- Heroic
- Historical romance
- Hymn poem praising God or other divine being or place, often sung.
- Lyric and song
- Ode: poem of high seriousness with irregular stanzaic forms
- Oration
- Sonnet lyric poem that is 14 lines long. Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnets
are divided into two quatrains and a six-line "sestet," with the rhyme
scheme abba abba cdecde (or cdcdcd). English (or
Shakespearean) sonnets are composed of three quatrains and a final
couplet, with a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg. English sonnets
are written generally in iambic pentameter.
ANALISI
- To
guess the historical period from the title and makes considerations.
- To
identify the genre.
- To
identify: ▪ number of
stanzas;
▪ lines in each stanza;
▪ rhyme scheme;
▪ rhetorical figures;
▪ figures of sound.
- To
talk about the poem in his general content.
- To
identify and to describe the most important stanzas.
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