Stephen Fry - The Ode Less Travelled - Unlocking The Poet Within

cauda, caudate sonnet Lit. tail . A three-line coda to a sonnet , consisting of a trimeter and two pentameters .

cento A collage poem made up of lines of real verse from different poems.

chant royal A sixty-line poem with envoi. I spared you it in Chapter Three out of care for your sanity.

chiasmus From the Gr. letter chi , meaning a ‘crossing’ of sense. A common rhetorical figure, ‘It’s not the men in my life, it’s the life in my men’, ‘one should eat to live, not live to eat’, ‘Real pain for sham friends, Champagne for real friends’ etc.

choliamb A scazon q.v.–kind of metrical substitution, usually with ternary feet replacing binary. Forget about it.

chronogram A gematric q.v. poem or motto whose letters when added as Roman numerals make up a significant number, such as a date: e.g. Lord have mercie vpon vs = 1666 (or 1464 or permutations thereof ).

cinquain A stanza of five lines. Esp. in reference to the verse of Adelaide Crapsey.

clerihew From Edmund Clerihew Bentley. A non-metrical comical and biographical quatrain whose first line is the name of its subject.

clipped As acephalous q.v., omission of the first metrical unit in a line of verse.

closed form Any form of verse whose stanza length, rhyme scheme and other features are fixed.

closet drama Not, as you might think, the hysterics attendant upon coming out, but a play written to be read, not performed. A genre invented by the Roman playwright Seneca.

Cockney School Blackwood (of Magazine fame) and the Quarterly Review q.v. used this snobbish and wholly inappropriate appellation to describe the ‘bad’ poetic diction of Keats and Leigh Hunt and their circle. Byron, too, ‘disapproved of that School of Scribbling’ and believed Keats guilty of wasting his talents in ‘Cockneyfying and Suburbing’ (letter to John Murray, 1821).

common metre ballad metre, i.e. 4-3-4-3, rhyming abab or abcb

conceit An extended metaphor or fanciful image.

connotation The associative, implied meaning of a word, as opposed to its denotation q.v.

consonance A loose or exact repetition of consonant sounds either used internally, or as partial rhyme. ‘And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old’, fuck/fork , pushing/passion , past the post etc.

corona sequence A sonnet sequence where the last line of a sonnet is used as the first line of the next. The final sonnet will end with the opening line of the first in the sequence.

coronach A threnody or funeral dirge.

counter-turn Ben Jonson’s word for antistrophe q.v.

couplet A pair of rhyming lines.

cretic Alternative name for the amphimacer q.v., after the Cretan poet Thaletas.

cross-rhyme End-rhyming of alternate lines: abab cdcd etc.

curtal Name for a sonnet that falls short of the usual fourteen lines, if such a thing can be said to exist. Properly speaking, the Hopkins stanza with an octave reduced to a sestet.

cynghanedd From Welsh poetry, a style of interlaced alliteration : as employed by Hopkins.

dactyl Ternary foot. , or long-short-short in classical prosody.

denotation The strict, literal meaning of a word, stripped of its connotation q.v., colour, suggestion, implications etc.

diacritic -al A sign, such as an accent or cedilla, that goes above or below a letter to indicate a change in pronunciation.

diamante Wretchedly silly diamond-shaped verse form in which one word becomes its opposite or antithesis according to pointless rules that I can’t be bothered to go into again.

diction In poetry, the choice of words. The discourse, frame of reference, atmosphere, coloration and other aspects of word choice are all elements of poetic d .

didactic Lit. ‘teaching’–writing that intends (usu. moral) instruction.

dieresis Diacritical mark–the two dots used to show that a diphthong ’s vowel sounds should be pronounced separately, ‘Noël’, ‘naïve’; etc. In metre, a word meaning a natural caesura (i.e. one that does not break a word or clause).

dimeter A verse line of two metric feet.

diminishing rhyme A rhyme scheme where each new rhyme takes a syllable or letter less than its predecessor: promotion , emotion, motion, ocean and passing, arsing, sing etc.

diphthong Two vowels together.

dipodic Composed of two feet (as most humans are).

dirge A mourning, wailing lament.

dithyramb, dithyrambic Wild choral Dionysiac celebratory verse. Often used to describe overblown poetic diction q.v.

divine afflatus (Now mock comic) phrase used to describe poetic inspiration.

dramatic monologue (Non theatrical) verse in the voice of a character, often addressing another imaginary character or the reader him/herself. ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘Andrea del Sarto’, sections of The Waste Land etc.

eclogue From Virgil, pastoral poem.

elegiac Of mourning. The elegiac quatrain abab in iambic pentameter was developed by Thomas Gray for his country churchyard.

elision The omission of words or parts of words.

encomium Praise song or ode for a (usu. living) person.

endecasíllabo Italian name for a hendecasyllabic line of iambic pentameter.

end-rhyming The rhyming of final words, or final stressed syllables in lines of verse. Usual rhyming, in fact.

end-stopped Lines of verse which do not run on in sense, but whose thought ends with the line. Lines without enjambment q.v.

enjambment The running-on of sense over the end of a line of verse. Verse that is not end-stopped q.v.

entry Just testing to see whether you had got to q.v. q.v. yet.

envelope rhyme A couplet nested in two outer rhymes, as in abba .

envoi A short stanza of summation or conclusion at the end of a poem. Found in certain closed forms, such as the sestina and ballade q.q.v.

epanalepsis General word for repetition or resumption of a theme.

epanaphora Extreme anaphora q.v. As in Wendy Cope’s ‘My Lover’ in which every line begins with the word ‘For’.

epanodos Recapitulation and expansion of an image or idea.

epigram Memorably witty remark, saying or observation.

epistrophe Repetition at the end of clauses or sentences: ‘When I was a child, I spake as I child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child’ etc.

epithalamium A poem celebrating a wedding: nuptial or hymeneal verse. No specific formal requirements. Much the same as prothalamium to be honest.

epode The third part of the Pindaric Ode ’s triad. Called by Jonson the stand .

esemplastic Rather fine word coined by Coleridge to describe an unlike imaginative union of two qualities or things.

expletive A word or words used to fill the metrical requirements of a line. The iambic pentameter ‘He thus did sit him down upon the rock’, is saying no more than ‘he sat on the rock’, the other five words are expletives.