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

repetend Any word or phrase that is (to be) repeated.

rhadif The refrain line of a ghazal .

rhapsody The sung part of an epic or saga. Applied to moments of lyricism in otherwise non-lyric verse, i.e. the ‘Isles of Greece’ section in Byron’s Don Juan.

rhopalic Progression of words whereby each word is longer by one syllable than its predecessor.

rhopalics Too silly to bother with.

rhyme royal, rime royal An open stanza form following the scheme ababbcc . Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ are written in this form.

rhyme-scheme The pattern of rhyming in a stanza or passage of verse, abba abab, aa etc represent various examples of r. s.

rich rhyme The rhyming of words that either look and sound the same but have a different meaning ( homonyms ), ‘the sound is very sound’, or words that sound the same but look different, ( homophones ) like blue/blew or praise/preys, >or words that look the same but sound different, ‘he wore a bow and made a bow to the audience’ etc.

rictameter See rhopalics.

rime en kyrielle Used to describe any rentrement q.v. or poetic refrain.

rime retournée Backwards rhyme, but of sound not spelling: i.e. not emit and time, Eros and sore but mite or might and time, Eros and sorry etc.

rising rhythm Metre whose primary movement is from unstressed to stressed, iambs and anapaests for example.

rondeau Closed French form with various English guises. R-aabba aabR aabbaR seems to be the most common form, where R is the first half of the opening line. ‘In Flanders Fields’ by John McCrea is a well-known example of this kind of r .

rondeau redoublé Variation of rondeau q.v. where the last lines of each stanza become refrain lines for the following stanzas. See the ‘More Closed French Forms’ section of Chapter Three.

rondel Another French rentrement form. Check it out in Chapter Three, as above.

rondel prime Ditto basically.

rondelet And again.

rondine The name of Shiraz’s sister in Footballer’s Wives . No, but shush at once.

roundel Swinburne’s name for his adaptation of one or other of the French letter-R forms.

roundelay Refrained verse of some bloody kind.

Rubai, ruba’iat, ruba’iyat At last, sense. Quatrain verse of Persian origin, rhyming aaba , ccdc etc.

salad Summery vegetable assemblage not to be confused with ballad or ballade q.v. Often contains tomatoes q.v.

Sapphic metre In classical verse, a hendecasyllabic line composed of a trochee , an anceps , a dactyl , a trochee and a spondee .

Sapphic Ode A stanza of three lines in Sapphic metre as above, followed by an Adonic line. The English stress-based adaptation as seen in Pope and others is usually in iambic pentameter or tetrameter with an iambic dimeter instead of a true Adonic.

Satanic School Southey’s petulant name for poets like Byron, Shelley and Leigh Hunt who were better than he was and had more integrity.

scazon Substitution of a ternary foot for a binary. See choliamb .

schwa The phonetic character that stands for a scudded uh sound, as in the weak vowel sounds in words like act and comm n and gramm .

scop Old English or Nordic storyteller, bard or poet.

Scriblerus, Martin Group pseudonym under which satirical verses were published in the eighteenth century. Prominent members included Swift and Pope. Also known as the Scriblerus Club.

scud To skip lightly over a syllable imparting no stress.

sdrucciolo Cool word for triple-rhyme .

semantics The study of linguistic meaning.

semeion A basic metrical unit, either stressed or unstressed.

semiotics, semiology The study of linguistic (and by extension social, cultural etc.) signs. The base study in structuralism, formalism, Saussurian linguistics, Lévi-Strauss-style social anthropology etc.

senryu, senriu A haiku that is more about people than nature.

septain A stanza of seven lines.

sestet A stanza of six lines; also the final six lines of a (usually) Petrarchan sonnet.

sestina A closed verse form in six stanzas and an envoi determined by rules of some complexity. See the section devoted to it in Chapter Three.

Shakespearean sonnet The native English sonnet form adapted by Drayton, Sidney and others which found its apotheosis at the hands of Will. It rhymes abab cdcd efef gg .

shaped poem See pattern poems.

shasei The ‘sketch of nature’ that a haiku is supposed to render.

Skeltonics Merry, rather clumsy subversive and scurrilous irregular verses, named after John S. (fifteenth–sixteenth-century English poet). Sometimes called tumbling verse.

slam Originally Chicagoan poetry contests or public recitals of verse held as entertainment events.

slant-rhyme See partial rhyme.

song that luc bat A version of luc bat .

sonnet A poem of fourteen lines, usually following a particular scheme, e.g. Petrarchan, Shakespearean, Spenserian or variations thereof.

sonnet of sonnets A sequence of fourteen sonnets.

sonnet redoublé A fifteen-poem corona sequence in which the fifteenth is made of the last lines of the previous fourteen. Something to do between lunch and tea.

Spenserian sonnet Close to Shakespearean s., but with vestigial Petrarchan internal couplets: abab bcbc cdcd ee.

Spenserian stanza An open stanzaic form in iambic pentameter developed by Spenser for The Faerie Queen and later used by Keats and Tennyson. It rhymes ababbcbcc and features a final line in iambic hexameter, an alexandrine .

spondee A metrical unit of two stressed feet. Or long feet if you’re an ancient Greek.

sprung rhythm A phrase coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins to describe verse in which only the stresses are counted. See the section on it towards the end of Chapter One.

stand A place to put a cake. Or , Ben Jonson’s word for epode .

stanza, stanzaic What a verse is to a hymn or song, so a stanza is to a poem.

stave Sometimes used to refer to a stanza.

stichic Of or in lines : how a poem is presented as distinct to prose. Christopher Ricks once said the real defining difference between prose and poetry was that whereas prose has to go to the end of a line, with poetry it’s an option. Reductive logic at its best.

stichomythia Verse presented as dialogue, often rapidly alternating between speakers. In verse drama refers to dialogue of single lines rather than speeches.