Fixed Form Poetry Vocabulary

written in lines; also called VERSE

Ex: to be, not not to be..

Written or spoken language in its ordinary form, without metrical structure.

Ex: “the woods look lovely against the setting darkness…”

An arranged pattern of rhythm in a line of verse or the pattern of beats that combine to form the rhythm in a line; type of beat in a line of poetry

Ex: Whose woods I think I know; can be classified into iambic or dactyl/tetra

A grouped set of lines within a poem

The pattern of rhyme in a poem

Ex: ABBA

When a poem has lines ending with words that sound the same.

Ex: Star Light, Star Bright

A rhyme involving a word in the middle of a line and another at the end of the line or in the middle of the next.

Ex: I went to town to buy a gown

Poetry that DOES NOT follow any rules, rhyme scheme, etc.

Ex: Langston Hughes’ and Emily Dickinson’s poetry

A poem that may be categorized by the pattern of its lines, meter, rhythm, or stanzas.

Ex: sonnet

Two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit.

Ex: A little learning is a dangerous thing/Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.

A pair of rhyming iambic pentameters, much used by Chaucer and the poets of the 17th and 18th centuries such as Alexander Pope.

Ex: then share thy pain, allow that sad relief/ah, more than share it, give me all thy grief

A set or group of three lines of verse rhyming together or connected by rhyme with an adjacent tercet.

Ex: haikus

A type of tercet that has a AAA rhyme scheme so that all three lines in the stanza rhyme with each other.

Ex: Oh, Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find!/I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind;/But although I give you credit, ’tis with such a heavy mind!

Stanza with four lines

Ex: Rose are red/Violets are blue/Sugar is sweet/And so are you.

An arrangement of triplet, especially in iambs, that rhyme aba bcb cdc, etc.

Ex: Dante’s Divine Comedy

A four-line stanza in iambic meter in which the first and third unrhymed lines have four metrical feet and the second and fourth rhyming lines have three metrical feet.

Ex: Barbara Allen

14 line poem following very specific rules, using iambic pentameter usually including VOLTAS (about 2/3 way where shift in tone/mood, attitude, etc. occur)

A poem or stanza of eight lines; an octet.

Ex: Annabel Lee by Poe

A sonnet consisting of an octave rhyming abba abba and a sestet rhyming in any of various patterns (as cde cde or cdc dcd)

There are three quatrains, which have four lines each, followed by a couplet, which is two lines. The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g.

Ex: Sonnet number 18 by Shakespeare: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”

A nineteen-line poem with two rhymes throughout, consisting of five tercets and a quatrain, with the first and third lines of the opening tercet recurring alternately at the end of the other tercets and with both repeated at the close of the concluding quatrain.

Ex: One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

A poem with six stanzas of six lines and a final triplet, all stanzas having the same six words at the line-ends in six different sequences that follow a fixed pattern, and with all six words appearing in the closing three-line envoi.

Ex: Sestina: Altaforte by Ezra Pound

A pithy saying or remark expressing an idea in a clever and amusing way.

Ex: “I am not young enough to know everything.” Oscar Wilde

A form of poetry, especially one in five-line anapestic meter with a strict rhyme scheme (AABBA), which is sometimes obscene with humorous intent. The first, second and fifth lines are usually longer than the third and fourth.

Ex: “There was an Old Man with a beard/Who said, ‘It is just as I feared!/Two Owls and a Hen,/Four Larks and a Wren,/Have all built their nests in my beard!'”

Poem whose first line has 5 syllables, second line has 7 syllables and third and final line has 5 syllables.

Ex:
I went hunting and (5)
I saw a deer that ran fast (7)
I wish it had stopped (5)

Mournful or reflective poem for the dead (the poetry form of a eulogy)

Ex: Annabelle Lee by Edgar Allen Poe

Lofty lyrical poem with complicated style and metrical pattern putting an object or thing on a pedestal.

Ex: ____ to the West Wind

Literally makes a picture

Makes fun – piece of writing or music that deliberately copies another work in comic or satirical way.
Caricature: visual form of this

Ex: Weird Al Yankovich; some SNL episodes