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

fabliau A (sometimes comic) tale, originally medieval French, now applied to any short moral fable in verse or prose.

falling rhythm Metre whose primary movement is from stressed to unstressed, dactylic and trochaic verse, for example.

false friend Word or phrase whose meaning is confused with other words or phrases (often from another language) which sound similar. ‘To meld’ is used often to mean to ‘fuse’ or ‘unite’ through false friendship with ‘melt’ and ‘weld’–it actually means ‘to announce’. Similarly ‘willy-nilly’ is used to mean ‘all over the place’ where in reality it means ‘whether you like it or not’, i.e. ‘willing or unwilling’. Only sad pedants like me care about these misuses which are now common enough to be almost correct.

feedback See loop .

feminine ending An unstressed ending added to an iamb, anapaest or other usually rising foot. Hanging , waiter , television etc.

feminine rhyme The rhyming of feminine-ended words. The rhyme is always on the last stressed syllable. Rhymes for the above could be banging , later , derision .

fescennine Indecent or scurrilous verse.

filidh An Irish bard.

foot A metrical division: five feet to a pentameter , four to a tetrameter etc.

fourteeners Iambic heptameter. Seven iambs make fourteen syllables.

free verse Verse that follows no conventional form, rhyming scheme or metrical pattern.

ghazal Middle Eastern couplet form following special rules as described in Chapter Three.

gematri-a, -ic (Originally Kabbalistic) assignation of numerical value to letters–as in chronogram q.v.

glyconic Latin style of verse usu. with three trochees and a dactyl.

haijin A haiku practitioner.

haikai (no renga) The ancestor of haiku . Playful linked Japanese verse developed from the waka in the sixteenth century.

haiku Three-line verses (in English at least) with a syllable count of 5-7-5 and adhering to certain thematic principles.

hemistich A half-line of verse: the term is most often found in reference to Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry.

hendecasyllabic Composed of eleven syllables.

hendiadys Lit. ‘one through two’: a trope where a single idea is expressed by two nouns where usually it would be a qualified or modified noun: ‘nice and warm’ for ‘nicely warm’, ‘sound and fury’ for ‘furious sound’. Also phrase where ‘and’ replaces infinitive ‘to’ as in ‘try and behave’ for ‘try to behave’.

heptameter A line of verse in seven metrical feet. Fourteeners , for example.

heroic couplets Rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter.

heroic line Iambic pentameter.

heroic verse Poetry cast in heroic couplets.

hexameter A line of verse in six metrical feet.

hokku The opening verse of haikai , from which the haiku is descended.

homeoteleuton Repetition of words ending in like syllables: e.g. ‘readable intelligible syllables are horrible’, ‘a little fiddle in a pickle’ etc.

homostrophic Arrangement of identically structured stanzas, esp. as in Horatian and other ode forms.

Horatian Ode Ode in the manner of the Roman poet Horace, adopted, adapted, translated and imitated in English verse esp. in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Hudibrastic Used to describe the kind of tortured polysyllabic rhyming found in Samuel Butler’s mock-epic Hudibras .

hypermetric A line with an extra syllable. Technically, a hendecasyllabic line of pentameter is hypermetric.

hypermonosyllabic Optional synaeresis q.v. A word that can be sounded with either one or two syllables, i.e. ‘réal’, ‘flówer’ and ‘líar’ (can be said as ‘reel’, ‘flour’ and ‘lyre’).

ictus The unit of stress within a foot. The second element in an iamb , the first in a trochee , the third in an anapaest etc.

idyll A short pictorial poem, chiefly lyrical or pastoral: ‘idyllic’ is often now used to mean ‘ideal’ and ‘perfect’.

internal rhyme Oh for heaven’s sake it’s obvious, isn’t it? inversion Reversal of usual sentence structure. ‘Happy am I’, etc.

jeu d’esprit Merry word play or similar gamesome larkiness.

kenning A Norse and Anglo-Saxon metaphorical or metonymic yoking of words, such as ‘whale road’ for sea.

kigo The ‘season word’ placed in a haiku to tell the reader in which time of year the verse is set.

tomato A red savoury fruit sometimes known as a love-apple which has a place in many sauces and salads but none whatever in a glossary of poetical terms. Especially when it has not been inserted in the correct alphabetical order.

kireji The caesura that should occur in the first or second line of a haiku .

kyrielle A refrain verse form descended from an element of Catholic mass.

lay Narrative poem or short song.

leonine rhyme Internal rhyming in verse of long measure where the word preceding the caesura rhymes with the end-word.

limerick You know perfectly well.

lineation The arrangement of lines in a poem, how they break and how their length is ordered. Prescribed in metrical verse but at the poet’s discretion in free verse. See stichic .

lipograms Verse or writing where for some reason best known to himself the poet has decided to omit one letter throughout. As I have unquestionably done with the letter q here. Damn.

litotes Understatement for comic effect, often cast in negatives to indicate a positive: ‘a not unsatisfactory state of affairs’ for ‘a splendid outcome’ etc. Same as meiosis q.v.

loop See feedback .

luc bat A Vietnamese form described in Chapter Three.

lyric ode An open form of rhymed, stanzaic verse, usually in iambic pentameter, descended as much from the sonnet as from the Horatian Ode . Used to describe the odes of Keats and other romantic poets.

majuscule Capital letters. Upper Case.

masculine ending A stressed word end.

masculine rhyme The rhyming of same.

meiosis Cell division to a biologist, understatement to a grammarian. Often comical. See litotes .

melon Sweet pleasant fruit. What possible reason can it have for being in this glossary? Andrew Marvell stumbled on them as he passed, but otherwise they have no business being here. Please ignore this entry.

melopoeia Word coined by Ezra Pound to describe the overall soundscape of a poem.

mesostich Halfway point of a line–used to apply to acrostics that descend therefrom.

metaphor Figurative use of a word or phrase to describe something to which it is not literally applicable. ‘The ship ploughed through the waves’, ‘Juliet is the sun’, ‘there’s April in her eyes’ etc.

metonym A metaphoric trope in which a word or phrase is used to stand in for what it represents: ‘the bottle’ is a metonym for ‘drinking’, ‘the stage’ for ‘theatrical life’, ‘Whitehall’ for the civil service etc. Kennings q.v. and synecdoche are often metonymic.

minuscule non capital letters. lower case.