Unit 3: Craft and Structure

Poetry is a musical form of literature in which words may suggest multiple layers of meaning.

Poems consist of lines that may be organized into groups called stanzas.

Meter is the rhythmic pattern established by stresses, or beats, within each line of a poem.

Readers identify meter by scanning each line of a poem, or marking each stressed syllable with an accent (') and each unstressed syllable with a horseshoe symbol (˘).

Name: iamb
Symbol: ˘ '
Example: begin

Name: trochee
Symbol: ' ˘
Example: catching

Name: anapest
Symbol: ˘ ˘ '
Example: understand

Name: dactyl
Symbol: ' ˘ ˘
Example: bicycle

One classic pattern is iambic tetrameter, which contains eight syllables—four iambic feet.

One classic pattern is iambic tetrameter, which contains eight syllables—four iambic feet.

Another classic pattern is iambic pentameter, which contains ten syllables—five iambic feet—as in the following example.

When a line breaks before completing a grammatical unit that can stand on its own, the line is said to be enjambed.

For example, poems written in free verse do not follow regular metrical patterns.

Rhyme is the repetition of vowel and consonant sounds at the ends of words, as in the words proud and allowed.

A couplet is a pair of rhyming lines, usually of the same meter and length.

Alliteration is the repetition of initial consonant sounds.

Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds within stressed syllables that end in different consonant sounds.

Consonance is the repetition of final consonant sounds in stressed syllables that have different vowel sounds.

Onomatopoeia is an actual or invented word that imitates the sound of what it names or describes.

Voice emerges from a poem's speaker, who serves the same function as the narrator in a story.

Voice emerges from a poem's speaker, who serves the same function as the narrator in a story.

Tone is the attitude projected toward the subject and the audience.

Denotation is a word's definition.

Connotations are the emotional associations a word evokes.

Sensory details, which appeal to sight, sound, hearing, taste, and touch, create imagery in the mind of the reader and evoke emotional associations.

Figurative Language is not meant to be taken literally.

Similes make direct comparisons between unlike things using as or like: Her glance hit me like a spear.

Metaphors make direct comparisons by stating that one thing is another: Her glance was a spear.

Personification gives human qualities to nonhuman things: The lights in the window winked at me.

Hyperbole is an extreme exaggeration: After three eons, I saw him again.

Narrative poetry tells a story and has a plot, characters, and a setting.

An epic poem is a long narrative poem about gods or heroes.

A ballad is a shorter poem that describes a single event and may be set to music.

Lyric poetry expresses the feelings of a single speaker, using melodic language, imagery, rhythm, and sound devices to express emotions.

Odes are poems of praise that often exhibit complex metrical patterns, specific rhyme schemes, and stanzas of ten or more lines each.

Elegies are poems of loss that express both praise for the dead and an element of consolation.

Sonnets are fourteen-line poems in which each line consists of five iambic feet (iambic pentameter).

A haiku is a form of Japanese poetry that consists of three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables.

A tanka is a form of Japanese poetry that has five unrhymed lines consisting of five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables.

In a Shakespearean sonnet, the lines are grouped into three quatrains (groups of four lines) and a couplet, a pair of rhymed lines.

A villanelle is a nineteen-line form with a pattern of repeated lines and a specific rhyme scheme.