Glossary

A metrical foot consisting of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. This is the rhythm of ordinary English speech. Examples of iambic words are "divide" and "deter." Gerard Manley Hopkins' "The Windhover" begins deceptively with a line that appears to have five iambic feet, "I caught this morning morning's minion, king-", but that scans differently in his own sprung rhythm. A double foot termed the di-iamb / ~ ' ~ ' / was common in Classical Greek and Latin.

A Classical Greek and Latin metre with three iambic feet (also known in English as the Alexandrine).

the stress.

Either a pastoral poem about shepherds or an epyllion, a brief epic that depicts a heroic episode. An example of the second is Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Idylls of the King."

An expression that describes a literal sensation, whether of hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, and feeling.

A movement of early 20th-century poets who used colloquial, concise, and image-laden language, not poetic diction. These include Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, H.D., D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, and Amy Lowell.

Quatrain with the rhyme scheme abba (sometimes termed an envelope), written in iambic tetrameter, and named after Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem of the same name.

See Rhyme.

A Classical Greek and Latin double foot consisting of two unstressed syllables and two stressed syllables, either ionic a majore / ' ' ~ ~ / or ionic a minore / ~ ~ ' ' /.

Stating something by saying another quite different thing, sometimes its opposite. An example is Sir Thomas Wyatt's "And I have leave to go, of her goodness" from his "They flee from me."

All stressed syllables are separated in isochronous metre by equal duration of time no matter how many slacks or unstressed syllables occur between them.

A line or lines that consist of clauses of equal length.

See Sonnet.