Poetry Terms Glossary Chart (Page 2 of 4) in pdf

2. Eye rhyme- rhyme that appears correct from spelling, but is half-rhyme or slant rhyme from the

pronunciation.

Examples include

watch/match, love/move

forth/worth, come/home, bury/fury, stove/shove, or ear/bear.

Feminine rhyme- a rhyme of two syllables, one stressed and one unstressed, as “waken” and

“forsaken” and “audition” and “rendition.” Feminine rhyme is sometimes called double rhyme.

(generally multi-syllable rhyme)

Internal rhyme- rhyme that occurs within a line, rather than at the end. The following lines contain

internal rhyme:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

While I nodded, nearly napping. . suddenly there came a tapping . . . .

5. Masculine rhyme- rhyme that falls on the stressed and concluding syllables of the rhyme-words.

Examples include “keep” and “sleep,” “glow” and “no,” and “spell” and “impel.” (generally single-

syllable rhyme)

6. Oblique rhyme-Imperfect rhyme scheme.

Rhyme scheme-The act of assigning letters in the alphabet to demonstrate the rhyming lines in a

poem.

8. Slant rhyme (also called inexact rhyme): Rhymes created out of words with similar but not identical

sounds. In most of these instances, either the vowel segments are different while the consonants are

identical, or vice versa. This type of rhyme is also called approximate rhyme, inexact rhyme, near

rhyme, half rhyme, off rhyme, analyzed rhyme, or suspended rhyme. The example below comes from

William Butler Yeats:

Heart-smitten with emotion I sink down /My heart recovering with covered eyes; / Wherever I had looked I

had looked upon / My permanent or impermanent images.

Slant rhyme has also been used for splendid intentional effect in poems such as Philip Larkins' "Toads" and

"Toads Revisited," and has been increasingly popular with postmodern British poets after World War II.

Contrast with eye-rhyme and exact rhyme.

Rhythm and Meter

Rhythm- the recurrence of stressed and unstressed syllables. The presence of rhythmic patterns lends

both pleasure and heightened emotional response to the listener or reader.

Scansion- a system for describing the meter of a poem by identifying the number and the type(s) of

feet per line

Caesura- a pause, usually near the middle of a line of verse, usually indicated by the sense of the line,

and often greater than the normal pause. For example, one would naturally pause after “human’ in

the following line from Alexander Pope:

To err is human, to forgive divine.

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Poetry Terms Glossary Chart Page 2