consonants: lake, fate, steak, haven
consonance: repetition of ending consonant sounds preceded by differing vowel
sounds (bolt, welt; cake, folk), also called half rhyme or slant rhyme
onomatopoeia: sound that echoes sense or meaning: hiss, whisper, buzz, “The wren
whistles from the garden/And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”
caesura: a silence rather than a sound but it affects the perception of sound
and rhythm; usually a pause or break in the metrical pattern of a verse, often
signalled by punctuation or syntactical unit such as prepositional phrase,
subject-verb inversion; noted by double diagonal //
end-stopped line: syntactical pause at end of line
enjambment/run-on line: syntactical sense carries over to next line
Diction and syntax affect sound as well as meaning: monosyllabic words have
different sound and rhythm than polysyllabic words even when meter is same.
“wandering” is dactylic and wanders (meandering meanders)
“run for it” is also dactylic but includes pauses that make it a less gentle
and flowing phrase than “wandering”
“Take her up // tenderly” (Thomas Hood) is dactylic dimeter; first dactyl
seems to have a different rhythm from the second because of a combination of
sounds
Stanza Patterns
couplet: two-lines, frequently a rhyming pair
heroic couplet: rhymed iambic pentameter unit of thought, syntactically complete
tercet/triplet: AAA
quatrain: 4 lines
ballad stanza: alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter ABCB
heroic quatrain: iambic pentameter ABAB
blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter (19th century dramatic monologues,
Shakespeare’s plays)
free verse/vers libre: irregular rhythm and rhyme, often unpredictable or absent
patterns, characterized instead by
repetition of sounds, words, phrases, images
parallel grammatical structure
significant line length and arrangement
other sound devices: alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, sprung rhythm (see
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”)
nonmetrical cadences
Free Verse (open form): Free verse has predecessors in the nonmetrical rhythms
of Greek poetry, the cadences of the King James Bible Psalms, Milton’s poetry;
however, the true groundbreaker for free verse rhythms was America’s Walt
Whitman in the nineteenth century
Some Familiar Fixed (Closed) forms
Sonnet
Villanelle
“Venus and Adonis” stanza: ABABCC (see Puritan poetry)
Closed couplets
Terza rima: ABA BCB CDC (”Acquainted with the Night”)