1. Alliteration  Repetition of initial consonant sounds: Example: With blade, with bloody, blameful blade…

2. Assonance  Assonance is the repetition of middle vowel sounds Example: fight/hive (note the “I” sounds)

3. Blank Verse Blank verse is unrhymed uniambic pentameter. (Note: this is what the majority of Shakespeare’s plays are written in.)

4. Consonance  Consonance is the repetition of inner or end consonant sounds in words. Example: broods with warm breast (note the “r” sounds).

5. Foot A foot is made up of a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry (and typically represents one beat).

6. Rising Feet The two types of rising feet are Iamb Anapest

7. Falling Feet The two type of falling feet are Trochee Dactyl

8. Other types of feet Spondee: two unstressed syllables in a row. Pyrrhic foot: two stressed syllables in a row.

9. Free Verse Free verse is poetry (usually contemporary) that has no meter or rhyme, and line length may vary.

10. Internal Rhyme This happens when you have rhyme within a line (which is itself an example) Another example: “There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold.”

11. Meter Meter is the number of feet per line Monometer: one foot Dimeter: two feet Trimeter: three feet Tetrameter: four feet Pentameter: five feet Hexameter: six feet Heptameter: seven feet

12. Onomatopoeia The use of words to imitate real sounds Example: crack, snap, buzz

13. Personification Personification is giving human characteristics to either animate or inanimate things.

14. Rhyme Exact: rose, toes Slant: hiss, fizz Identical: cat, cat

15. Rhyme Scheme The marking of end rhymes (at the end of a line) with letters, such as A, B, A, B Example: Annihilating all that’s made (A) To a green thought in a green shade (A)

16. Scansion Marking the feet and meter for the poem, so as to identify its overall pattern, such as iambic pentameter

17. Sestina A poem consisting of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three line closer. The words at the end of each stanza are repeated in new patterns in successive stanzas.

18. Sonnet A poem of 14 lines in iambic pentameter, consisting of three quatrains and a couplet, with a rhyme scheme of ABAB,CDCD,EFEF, GG

19. Stanza A grouping of lines in a poem (equivalent to a paragraph in prose). Two lines: couplet Three lines: tercet Four lines: quatrain

20. Villanelle A poem consisting of five tercet and a quatrain, in which the first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated as the final lines of the following tercets—and then used together in the close.