Glossary

A bawdy medieval verse narrative, originally French but adapted by Geoffrey Chaucer's in "The Miller's Tale," "The Reeve's Tale," "The Merchant's Tale," and others of The Canterbury Tales.

see Rhyme.

One of many kinds of word-play, focusing either on sound and word-order (schemes) or on semantics (tropes). A figure of speech usually describes one thing in terms of another.

See Alcaics, Alexandrine, Asclepiad, Aubade, Ballad, Ballade, Carol, Choka, Cinquain, Clerihew, Dizain, Double Dactyl, Dramatic monologue, Eclogue, Elegy, Epic, Epistle, Epithalamion, Fabliau, Free verse, Haiku, Heroic couplet, Idyll, Limerick, Madrigal, Mock epic, Ode, Ottava rima, Pastoral, Pattern poetry, Quatrain, Quintain, Renga, Reverdie, Rondeau, Rondel, Sestina, Sixain, Sonnet, Spenserian stanza, Tanka, Tercet, Terza rima, Terzain, Triolet, Villanelle, and Virelay.

A poem of invective by two speakers trying to out-humiliate one another.

Popular, often anonymous sung lyrics that may be passed on by word-of-mouth originally before being compiled by scholars into literary collections.

The basic unit of measurement of accentual-syllabic metre, usually thought to contain one stressed syllable and at least one unstressed syllable. The standard types of feet in English are iambic, trochaic, dactylic, anapestic, spondaic, and pyrrhic. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Metrical Feet" exemplifies the metre the first five, and of two classical measures, the amphibrach and the amphimacer (stressed feet are in boldface):

Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow spondee stalks; strong foot! yet ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long; --
With a leap and a bound the swift anapests throng;
One syllable long, with one short at each side,
Amphibrachys hastes with a stately stride; --
First and last being long, middle short, Amphimacer
Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud high-bred Racer.

An often repeated phrase, sometimes half-a-line long and metrically distinctive.

A passage in a piece of prose shaped by a reader into quasi-metrical lines and republished as a poem.

See Poulter's Measure.

Rhythmical but non-metrical, non-rhyming lines. These may have a deliberate rhythm or cadence but seem to disappoint the reader's expectation for a formal metre, such as iambic pentameter.