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| 6359574887 | CONSONANCE | the repetition of similar consonant sounds in a group of words. The term refers to words in which the ending consonants are the same but the vowels that precede them are different. Consonance is found in the following pairs of words: "add" and "read," "bill and ball," and "born" and "burn." | 0 | |
| 6359579569 | CONCEIT | conceit- an ingenious and fanciful notion or conception, usually expressed through analogy, and pointing to a striking parallel between two seemingly dissimilar things. A conceit may be a brief metaphor, but it also may form the framework of an entire poem. A famous example of a conceit occurs in John Donne's poem "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," in which he compares his soul and his wife's to legs of a mathematical compass. | 1 | |
| 6359584491 | DIDACTIC POEM | a poem which is intended primarily to teach a lesson. The distinction didactic poetry and non-didactic poetry is difficult to make and usually involves a subjective judgement of the author's purpose on the part of the critic or the reader. Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism is a good example of didactic | 2 | |
| 6359591253 | EXTENDED METAPHOR | an implied analogy, or comparison, which is carried throughout a stanza an entire poem. In "The Bait," John Donne compares a beautiful woman to fish bait and men to fish who want to be caught by the woman. Since he carries these comparisons all the way through the poem, these are considered 'extended metaphors.' | 3 | |
| 6359614357 | heroic couplet | two end-stopped iambic pentameter lines rhymed aa, bb, cc with the usually completed in the two-line unit. See the following example from Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock: But when to mischief mortals bend their will, How soon they find fit instruments of ill! | 4 | |
| 6359617694 | metonymy | a figure of speech which is characterized by the substitution of a term object closely associated with the word in mind for the word itself. In this way we commonly speak of the king as the "crown," an object closely associated with kingship | 5 | |
| 6359626099 | quatrain | a four-line stanza with any combination of | 6 | |
| 6359628602 | villanelle | a nineteen-line poem divided into five tercets and a final quatrain. The villanelle only two rhymes which are repeated as follows: aba, aba, aba, aba, aba, abaa. Line 1 is repeated entirely to form lines 6, 12, and 18, and line 3 is repeated entirely to form lines 9, 15, and 19; thus, eight of the nineteen lines are refrain. Dylan Thomas's poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" is an example of a villanelle | 7 | |
| 6359638393 | ASSONANCE | the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds. "A land laid waste with all its men slain" repeats the same "a" sound in "laid," "waste," and "slain." | 8 | |
| 6359642755 | APHORISM | A short, pithy and instructive statement of truth; e.g. "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" (Lord Acton, 1887). From the Greek: "to speak out;" pron.: AF-or-izm. Also called a maxim, or apothegm (pron.: APP-eh-them). The Bible is full of aphorisms, e.g.: "pride goes before a fall" (Prov. 16:18); "a house divided against itself cannot stand" (Mt. 12:25); "with the measure you use, it will be measured to you" "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" | 9 | |
| 6359808548 | DIGRESSION | A literary device in which the author creates a temporary departure from the main subject or narrative in order to focus on a related matter. There are several famous digressions in Homer, such as the "wall scene" in Book 3 of the Iliad when Helen surveys the armies from the top of the Trojan Wall. | 10 | |
| 6359826725 | EPITHET | a picturesque tag or nickname associated with a certain character. Epithets can serve as a device to remember and distinguish different characters. | 11 | |
| 6359835664 | EPONYM | the person for whom something is named, such as the central characters of Hamlet and King Lear, from whom those plays take their titles. | 12 |
