Poetic Terms

Assonance
Resemblance or similarity in sound between vowels followed by different consonants in two or more stressed syllables. Assonance differs from RHYME in that RHYME is a similarity of vowel and consonant. "Lake" and "fake" demonstrate RHYME; "lake" and "fate" assonance. Assonance is a common substitution for END-RHYME in the popular ballad, as in these lines from "The Twa Corbies":
In behint yon auld fail dyke,
I wot there lies a new-slain Knight.
Such substitution of assonance for END-RHYME is also characteristic of Emily Dickinson's verse, and is used extensively by many con- temporary poets.

As an enriching ornament within the line, assonance is of great use to the poet. Poe and Swinburne used it extensively for musical effect. Gerard Manley Hopkins introduced modern poets to its wide use. The skill with which Dylan Thomas manipulates assonance is one of his high achievements. Note its complex employment in the first STANZA of Thomas' "Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait":

The bows glided down, and the coast
Blackened with birds took a last look
At his thrashing hair and whale-blue eye
The trodden town rang its cobbles for luck.

Assonance is involved in "bows" (pronounced "boughs") and "down"; "blackened," "last," "thrashing," "hair," "whale," and "rang"; "took" and "look"; and "trodden" and "cobbles." (In passing one might also note the pattern of ALLITERATION in this stanza and that the RHYMING of look with luck is an example of consonance.)

Ballad
A form of verse to be sung or recited and characterized by its presentation of a dramatic or exciting EPISODE in simple narrative form. F. B. Gum mere describes the ballad as "a poem meant for singing, quite impersonal in material, probably connected in its origins with the communal dance, but submitted to a process of oral tradition among people who are free from literary influences and fairly homogeneous in character."
Though the ballad is a FORM still much written, the so-called "popular ballad" in most literatures belongs to the early periods before written literature was highly developed. They still appear, however, in isolated sections and among illiterate and semi-literate peoples. In America the folk of the southern Appalachian mountains have maintained a ballad tradition, as have the cowboys of the western plains, and people associated with labor movements, particularly when marked by violence.

In Australia the "bush" ballad is still vigorous and popular. In the West Indies the "Calypso" singers produce something close to the ballad with their impromptu songs. Debate still rages as to whether the ballad originates with an individual composer or as a group or communal activity. Whatever the origin, the folk ballad is, in almost every country, one of the earliest folms of literature. Certain common characteristics of these early ballads should be noted: the supernatural is likely to play an important part in events, physical courage and love are frequent themes, the incidents are usually such as happen to common people (as opposed to the nobility) and often have to do with domestic episodes; slight attention is paid to CHARACTERIZATION or DESCRIPTION, transitions are abrupt, action is largely developed through DIALOGUE, tragic situations are presented with the utmost simplicity, INCREMENTAL REPETITION is common, IMAGINATION though not so common as in the ART BALLAD nevertheless appears in brief flashes, a single EPISODE of a highly dramatic nature is presented, and often the ballad is brought to a close with some sort of summary STANZA. The greatest impetus to the study of ballad literature was given by the publication in 1765 of Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The standard modern collection still is The English and Scottish Popular Ballads edited by Francis James Child. The tradition of composing story-songs about current events and personages has been common for a long time. Hardly an event of national interest escapes being made the subject of a so-called ballad. Casey Jones, the railroad engineer; Floyd Collins, the cave explorer; the astronauts-- all have been the subjects of ballads. Popular songs, particularly those engendered by the youthful protest movements, have revived the ballad form; for example, "Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley," or the ballads of Bob Dylan or Joan Baez. Strictly speaking, however, these are not ballads in the traditional sense, and that form probably belongs to a period in the history of Western civilization which is past.

Couplet
Two lines of VERSE with similar END-RHYMES. Formally, the couplet is a two-line STANZA with both grammatical structure and idea complete within itself, but the form has gone through numerous adaptations, the most famous of which is HEROIC VERSE. In French literature couplet is sometimes used in the sense of STANZA. It is customary but not essential that the length of each line be the same. Couplets are usually written in octosyllabic and decasyllabic lines.  If they are set aside in the poem, they are a closed couplet.

Diction
It is helpful, for the purposes of understanding modern poetry, to think of diction as the attitude of the poet or speaker toward the subject matter conveyed through word choice and tone.

Foot
A measurable, patterned unit of poetic rhythm. The concept of the f. has been imported into modern accentual-syllabic prosedy from classical quantitative practice, and disagreement over the nature (and even the "existence") of the f. has been traditional since the late Renaissance. The Eng. f. is customarily defined by the orthodox as a measure of rhythm consisting of 1 accented (stressed, "long") syllable (or 2, as m the spondee) and 1 or more unaccented (unstressed, "short," "slack") syllables. The poetic line in a more or less regular composition, say the traditional prosodists, consists of a number of feet from 1 to 8; conventionally, the feet are to be roughly of the same kind, although metrical variations (q.v.), produced by the occasional "substitution" of different feet, are permissible so long as these substitutions do not efface for long the repeated pattern of the prevailing f.
In traditional Eng. accentual or accentual-syllabic verse the following feet are the most common:

iamb (iambic) x / (as in "destroy")
anapest (anapestic) x x / ("intervene")
trochee (trochaic) / x ("topsy")
dactyl (dactylic) / x x ("merrily")
spondee (spondaic) / / ("amen")
pyrrhic x x ("the sea | son of | mists")

What are these accents? Look here.

Iambic and anapestic feet are called ascending or rising feet; trochaic and dactylic, descending or falling. Feet of 2 syllables are called duple feet; feet of 3, triple. Spondaic (except in sprung rhythm, q.v.) and pyrrhic feet are generally "substitute feet. Some prosodists recognize also a monosyllabic f. con- sisting of I stressed syllable. The exemplification of these feet by single words, above, of course distorts their nature: it is important to remember that f. divisions do not necessarily correspond to word divisions, and that the structure of a f. is determined contextually by the nature of the feet which surround it.

The f. bears a close resemblance to the musical bar: both are arbitrary and abstract units of measure which do not necessarily coincide with the phrasal units which they underlie. The major difference between them is that the bar always begins with a "stress."

It is perhaps unfortunate that the terminology of feet is borrowed from classical quantitative prosody, where practice is in general much more regular than in most Eng. verse and where "substitutions" are largely governed by rule rather than by whim or instinct. The Greek and Latin poets included feet such as:

amphibrach x / x
bacchius x / /
molossus / / /
tribrach x x x

Free Verse
Poetry that is based on the irregular rhythmic CADENCE or the recurrence, with variations, of phrases, images, and syntactical patterns rather than the conventional use of METER. RHYME may or may not be present in free verse, but when it is, it is used with great freedom. In conventional VERSE the unit is the FOOT, or the line; in free verse the units are larger, sometimes being paragraphs or strophes. If the free verse unit is the line, as it is in Whitman, the line is determined by qualities of RHYTHM and thought rather than FEET or syllabic count. Such use of CADENCE as a basis for POETRY is very old. The poetry of the Bible, particularly in the King James Version, which attempts to approximate the Hebrew CADENCES, rests on CADENCE and PARALLELISM. The Psalms and The Song of Solomon are noted examples of free verse. Milton sometimes substituted rhythmically constructed VERSE paragraphs for metrically regular lines, notably in the CHORUSES of Samson Agonistes, as this example shows:

But patience is more oft the exercise
Of Saints, the trial of thir fortitude,
Making them each his own Deliver,
And Victor over all
That tyranny or fortune can inflict.
Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was a major experiment in cadenced rather than metrical VERSIFICATION.

All truths wait in all things
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon.

Matthew Arnold sometimes used free verse, notably in "Dover Beach." But it was the French poets of the late nineteenth century --Rimbaud, Laforgue, Viele-Griffln, and others--who, in their revolt against the tyranny of strict French VERSIFICATION, established the Vers libre movement, from which the name free verse comes.

In the twentieth century free verse has had widespread usage by most poets, of whom Rilke, St.-John Perse, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, and William Carlos Williams are representative. Such a list indicates the great variety of subject matter, effect and TONE that is possible in free verse, and shows that it is much less a rebellion against traditional English METRICS than a modification and extension of the resources of our language.

- Terminology 2 -