by Stephen Fry
oxymoron Lit. ‘sharp blunt’ a contradictory phrase: as in Romeo and Juliet’s ‘O loving hate! O heavy lightness!’, or a paradoxical phrase such as ‘eloquent silence’, ‘living death’ or ‘military intelligence’ (ho-ho).
paean A song of praise, encomium.
palilogy Repetition – what a lot of words for it there are.
panegyric Writing in praise of a character’s specific qualities or achievements.
pantoum Malayan closed form with refrained lines. See Chapter Three.
paragram To hide a name or word inside text. ‘A cut and paSTE PHENomenon’, or’ SuiTablE Poetic HiddEN word’.
paralepsis To say something while pretending not to: ‘I shall not mention his appalling table manners’ etc.
para-rhyme Partial rhyme, assonance or consonance rhyming, for example, head/bet, foul/stout, feel/full. Also called slant-rhyme or off-rhyme.
parody Imitation of the style of another.
paronomasia Wordplay, punning.
particle Small word like a conjunction (and, or, but), preposition (for, of, with, by), pronoun (they, his, me, who, that) and so on.
pathetic fallacy John Ruskin’s term for the romantic attribution of life and a soul to inanimate objects or principles, Nature esp.
pattern poem A poem whose physical shape on the page represents an object of some kind. Same as shaped poetry.
pentameter A metrical line of five feet.
periphrasis A roundabout way of speaking, circumlocution.
Petrarchan sonnet A sonnet form adapted from Petrarch’s original cycle of poems to his Laura: the octave rhymes abba abba and the sestet in English can be anything from the original cdecde to cdcdcd, cdcdee and other variations.
phaleucian A Greek metre consisting of a spondee, dactyl and three trochees.
phanopoeia Name Pound gave to Imagism in action – a revelatory or reified image.
phoneme Base unit of sound.
Pindaric Ode From the Greek poet Pindar; celebratory or praise songs that developed into formal triadic odes in English.
pleonasm Tautology, use of redundant words, unnecessary repetition – as in this entry. Not to be confused with ‘neoplasm’ which means a morbid new growth or tissue.
poesie, poesy Now poncey word for poetry.
polyptoton Repetition of the same word, but using different endings and inflexions e.g. ‘It’s socially unacceptable in society to socialise with an unsociable socialist’ etc.
prosody The art of versification: the very subject of this magnificent little book.
prothalamium An epithalamium, specifically one to be recited before entry into the bridal chamber (Spenser).
pyrrhic A binary foot of two unstressed units.
quantitative Of quantity. A word’s quantity is the sum of its vowel lengths. In quantitative verse, feet are not elements of stress but of sound duration (morae q.v.).‘Smooth’ is long,‘moth’ is short and so on. The stuff of classical verse, quantitative poetry was never much more than an experiment in the stress-timed English language. Longfellow’s Evangeline and Southey’s dactylic hexameters remain possibly the best-known examples.
Quarterly Review Tory magazine begun in 1809. Shelley held a ‘homicidal article’ in it responsible for Keats’s early demise: ‘Who killed John Keats? I, said the Quarterly, So savage and Tartarly, ’Twas one of my feats.’ Byron adapted S’s squib in Don Juan (but see under Cockney School).
quaternary Divided into four: in prosody this refers to metrical feet that have four units, such as the choriamb and the antispast.
quatorzain Name given to a fourteen-line poem that is not considered by the prosodist or critic using the term to be a ‘true’ sonnet. A subjective matter, to be honest.
quatrain A four-line stanza.
quintain A five-line stanza, or cinquain.
q.v. From Latin quod vide meaning ‘which see’ or ‘take a look at that one’, used in fancy glossaries like this to follow a word in the body of a definition which has its own entry q.v.
rann A quatrain in Irish verse.
redondilla Spanish verse cast in octosyllables.
refrain Line repeated at set intervals within a song or poem.
reify, reification To concretise the abstract, to embody an idea.
rentrement Refrain, burden or single-lined chorus.
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 commn 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.
stress The feeling that comes upon an author when he knows he must deliver a book to his publisher when it isn’t quite finished yet and there’s a glossary to be completed.
strophe The first part of a Pindaric Ode’s triad. What Jonson called the turn.
substitutions The use of an alien metric foot in a line of otherwise regular metrical pattern. Pyrrhic and trochaic substitutions are common in iambic verse, for example.
suspension of disbelief Term coined by Coleridge to describe a reader’s willingness to accept as true what clearly is not.
syllable, syllabic The basic sound unit of a word. Come on, you know perfectly well. Of poetry it refers to forms that are predicated on their syllabic count rather than any metric considerations. The haiku and the tanaga, for example.
syllepsis Kind of zeugma q.v. where a verb governs two unlikely nouns or phrases: as in ‘he left in a cab and a temper’, and Pope’s ‘Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade’.
synaeresis A gliding of two syllables into one: in the opening line of Paradise Lost ‘Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit’ d becomes the four-syllable ‘disobedyence’. Also called synaloepha.
synaloepha Look up at the preceding entry.
syncope The elision of a syllable from a word:‘prob’ly’ for ‘probably’ etc.
synecdoche A figure of speech in which the part stands in for the whole or vice versa: e.g.‘England won the Ashes’ where ‘England’ means the English Cricket XI,‘twenty hands’, where ‘hand’ stands for a crewman etc.
syzygy High score at Scrabble that means a pair of connected or corresponding things. Two hemistichs make a syzygy, you might say, or a plug and a socket together. In poetics also refers to multiple alliteration and consonance, as in the Ms in Tennyson’s ‘The moan of doves in immemorial elms/And murmuring of innumerable bees’ (from ‘The Princess’).
tanaga A syllabic Filipino verse form.
tanka A syllabic Japanese cinquain form of verse. The count is 5-7-5-7-7.
telestich An acrostic where it is the last letters that do the spelling out.
teleuton The terminating element of a line.
tercet A three-line stanza.
ternary A foot composed of three metrical elements. Anapaest, dactyl, amphimacer etc.
terza rima An open stanzaic form with interlocking crossrhyming. Used by Dante for his Inferno.
tetractys Bizarre form of syllabic verse developed by Mr Stebbing.
tetrameter A four-stress line.
transferred epithet Illogical (often comic) use of image, transferring meaning from mood of person to object: ‘I lit a moody cigarette’, ‘sad elms’ etc.
triad, triadic The three-part structure of Pindaric Odes. Each triad consists of strophe, antistrophe and epode or turn, counter-turn and stand as Ben Jonson dubbed them. Originated as actual physical movements in Greek choric dances.
tribrach Ternary unit of three unstressed syllables. Forget it.
trimeter A three-stress line.
triolet A closed French form of some sweetness. Or perhaps it’s just the name. It rhymes ABaAbbAB where A and B are rentrements.
triple rhyme Tri-syllabic (usually dactylic) rhyme, merited/inherited, eternal/infernal, merrier/terrier etc.
triplet Three-line couplet, aaa, bbb etc. Augustan poets braced them in a curly bracket.
trochee A binary metrical unit of stressed and unstressed syllables:
trope Any rhetorical or poetic trick, device or figure of speech that changes the literal meaning of words. Metaphor and other common figures are tropes.
tumbling verse See Skeltonics.
turn Ben Jonson’s word for a strophe.
twiner Term used by Walter de la Mare to describe a kind of double limerick form.
ubi sunt Lit.‘where are they?’ Poetic formula addressing something vanished:‘Where are the songs of Spring?’ (Keats,‘Ode to Autumn’), ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan? Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ (Ballade by François Villon).
vatic A poetic prophecy.
Venus and Adonis Stanza A six-line stanzaic form of iambic pentameter that takes its name from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. It rhymes ababcc. Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ etc.
vers libre French for free verse.
vignette In poetry, a delicate but precise scene or description.
villanelle See section devoted to it in Chapter Three.
virgule In metrics, the mark used for foot division.
volta The ‘turn’ marking the change of mood or thought between the (Petrarchan) sonnet’s octave and sestet q.q.v.
Vorticism Word coined by Pound for British phalanx of the modernist movement. Most often used to refer to work (in paint and verse) of Wyndham Lewis. They had their own fanzine – Blast!. Rejection of sentimentality and verbal profusion.
waka Original Japanese verse from which haikai and haiku descended.
weak ending See feminine ending, but take no offence therefrom.
wrenched accent Sound and sense of words vitiated by the need for them to fit the metre.
wrenched rhyme A word forced out of its natural pronuncia
tion by its need to rhyme.
wretched rhyme Bad rhyme.
wretched sinner Me.
zeugma Lit. ‘yoking’:‘she wore a Chanel dress and an expression of disappointment’. Essentially the same as syllepsis q.v. The differences between them are trivial and undecided.
zymurgy Word that always tries to get into glossaries and dictionaries last but is often beaten by zythum, which, ironically perhaps, it helps create. Something to do with fermentation. More connected to Yeast than Yeats.
zythum Ancient Egyptian beer.
APPENDIX
Arnaut’s Algorithm
The line-ends of the first stanza (A, B, C, D, E and F) are chosen for the second and subsequent stanzas according to a ‘spiral’ algorithm illustrated in Figure 1. It can be seen that the position and relative order of the line ending alters in a complex manner from stanza to stanza.
Figure 1:The ‘spiral’ algorithm
Consider line-end A: it moves down one line for the second stanza and then down two lines for the third stanza, down one line again for the fourth stanza and so on. The algorithm can therefore be considered as the sequence of displacements from the starting position, namely, +1; +2; +1, –2; +3; –5. The last displacement returns the first line-end (A) from the last line of the last stanza to the starting position.
Defining the sequence of translations as a we see that:
How do the other line-ends behave after six iterations? Well, consider the situation after the first iteration; line-end A now occupies the position previously occupied by line-end B. Now carry out six iterations, namely +2; +1; –2; +3; –5 and finally the first of the next cycle: +1. This sequence also sums to zero, meaning that the line-end returns to where it was. In general therefore we can say for all line ends in the first stanza corresponding to the position of line-end A after interation m;
which proves that the entire set of line-ends returns to the original position and order after a full cycle of six iterations, or in other words a seventh stanza would be identical (in respect of line-ends) to the first.
Acknowledgements
My thanks, as always, go to JO CROCKER for running my life with such efficiency, understanding and good humour while I have been engaged upon this book. My publisher SUE FREESTONE has shown her usual blend of patience, kindness, enthusiasm and accommodation, as have ANTHONY GOFF and LORRAINE HAMILTON, my literary and dramatic agents. Thanks to JO LAURIE for her game guinea-piggery in reading early sections on metre and trying out some of the exercises, and to my father for his baffling but beautiful sestina algorithm. Especial gratitude must go to IAN PATTERSON, poet, Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Queens’ College, Cambridge, for casting his learned and benevolent eye over the manuscript – all errors are mine, not his. I thank him also for allowing me to include his excellent centos and sestina. My thanks to his predecessors at Queens’, Professors A. C. SPEARING and IAN WRIGHT, and to PETER HOLLAND of Trinity Hall, who between them did their doomed best to make a scholar of me during my time there. Aside from my mother, the person who most awoke me to poetry was RORY STUART, a remarkable teacher who has now retired to Italy. I send him my eternal thanks. If every schoolchild had been lucky enough to have a teacher like him, the world would be a better and happier place.
