Literary Terms PDF

# Literary Terms ## Alliteration It is the appearance of the same sound or sounds at the beginning of two or more words that are next to or close to each other (the repetition of the first sounds in two or more words in the same line) as in: - Round the rocks **runs** the river (Shakespeare) - Who...

# Literary Terms ## Alliteration It is the appearance of the same sound or sounds at the beginning of two or more words that are next to or close to each other (the repetition of the first sounds in two or more words in the same line) as in: - Round the rocks **runs** the river (Shakespeare) - Who **loves** to **lie** with me (Coleridge) - The furrow **follows** free (Coleridge) ## Allegory A trope in which a second meaning is to be read beneath and concurrent with the surface story. Spenser's *The Faerie Queene* is allegorical in the sense that it could be read both as a simple story of adventure and as an account of the conflict between good and evil and the triumph of good over evil. ## Analogy Is a degree of likeness or sameness between two things: There is an analogy between the way water moves in waves and the way light travels. (2) A resemblance supposed to exist (“Money is like muck, not good unless it is spread”) (Bacon). ## Ballad Now has various meanings in literary or musical usage. In the former, it is restricted primarily to short simple narratives told lyrically. Popularly, any short song that appeals to sentiment may be termed a ballad; its content may be religious, political, amoristic, comic or tragic. ## Caesura Is a perceptible break in the metrical line properly described as an expressional pause. (It is the point at which a line of verse is divided into two parts for musical effect or poetic assertion) - Bright as the sun, her eyes the gazers strike - And, like the sun, they shine on all alike. ## Conceit Originally, that which is conceived in the mind, an idea. In literature, applied to association in imagery and figure; later, especially to such as display an over-elaborated analogy. ## Dirge A song of lamentation. In the Roman funeral processions, the nenia, song of praise for the departed, corresponding to the Greek threnody and epicedium, was chanted with the playing of flutes. ## Eclogue Is a short poem about country life, often in the form of a conversation. ## Elegy (Gr. word "elegia" of doubtful significance) Earliest Gr. Elegies were not dedicated to death, but to war and love. From the early 16th century, the elegy was employed in England as a funeral song or lament. (A type of poem or song written to show sorrow for the dead or for something lost). ## Epic Poetry As exemplified in the Homeric poems, the *Illiad* and the *Odyssey*, was reckoned oldest and ranked highest of Greek kinds. Epos meant “ord”: then a Speech or tale; a song; a heroic poem; heroic poetry. We may thence infer that the epic arose out of narrative poetry of a humbler sort, versified stories about heroes and their deeds. An epic is a long poem telling the story of the deeds of gods and great men or the early history of a nation). ## Hyperbole Is the use of a form of words which makes something sound big, small, loud, etc. by saying that it is like something even bigger, smaller, louder etc. (OR Exaggeration for other ends than credence, e.g. virtues as the sands of the shore). OR An exaggerated statement of the truth, made in order to strengthen the poetic effect: “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand” ## Image: (Imagery) Images are word-pictures, painted by the poet's imagination in such a way as to appeal to the reader's imagination. Similes and metaphors are forms of imagery. (2) An image is an expression evocative of an object of sensual appeal. It usually serves to make an impression more precise; it may, on the other hand, carry the mind from too close a dwelling on the original thought. (3) A figure of speech, esp. vision. (4) An image is a picture made out of words creating a connection between two dissimilar things. ## Invocation Appeal (to the Muse), usually near the beginning of a long poem, for inspiration in its writing. Continued as a convention long after the belief in Muses. ## Madrigal Originally a pastoral; now any short love song, especially one to tune. ## Metaphor The use of a phrase which describes one thing by stating another thing with which it can be compared (as in the roses in her cheeks) without using the words “like” or “as”. (2) The substitution of one thing for another, or the identification of two things, e.g. (Shakespeare) “Thou art the grave where buried love doth live”. Though often loosely defined as “an implied comparison”, “a simile without "like" or "as",…. ## Simile The comparison of two things of different categories (thus "John is as tall as Henry" is not a simile; but "John is as tall as a lamppost" is) because of a point or points of resemblance, and because the association emphasizes, clarifies, or in some way enhances the original, e.g. "Fair as a star, when only one is shining in the sky”. OR it is an explicit comparison between two dissimilar objects by the use of an instrument e.g. ‘like’ or ‘as' etc. Similes can be very simple ('My love is like a red, red rose'): they can be far-fetched ('You've got a face like the back of a bus'- a satisfactory way of insulting somebody). Or they can be subtle and delicate: - The winds that will be howling at all hours - And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers. ## Refrain (1) A phrase or verse recurring at intervals, especially at the end of a stanza. (2) It is the repetition of a phrase, or a line or more at the end of each stanza in a poem, - Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song. ## Rhyme; Rime Rhyme has been variously defined as a "correspondence of terminal sounds", as a "repetition of identical or closely similar sounds arranged at regular intervals", as a device by means of which extreme words of two periods are rendered like each other". It is the matching of the same sound or sounds at the end of two or more lines in a poem. It comes at the end of lines because it helps to create and make clear the musical pattern of the stanza. - To help to deck her and to help to sing, - That all the woods may answer and your echo ring. ## Nonologue (Soliloquey) (Gr. monos, one alone,+ logos, speech; solus, alone + loqui, to speak). In everyday usage the two words are interchangeable, designating almost any kind of extended individual utterance. In literary usage a distinction is customary: monologue is the broader category, the genus; soliloquey is one of its species. ## Ode Originally simply a poem intended or adapted to be sung to instrumental accompaniment. ## Onomatopoeia, Onomatopoeisis (1) The formation of words in imitation of natural sounds: bang; growl; swish. (2) The use of words so that the sound fortifies the sense. (3) The use of words whose sounds suggest their meanings; the hissing of snakes, mewing of cats, growling of dogs, howling of the wind, craking of a whip, booming of a gun and ticking of a watch. ## Personification (Gr. prosopopeia). (1) Speaking through the lips of a person not present, or deceased, or of institutions, ideas. (2) it is a kind of metaphor in which an inanimate object or abstract thing is personified and looked at as a human being. ## Sonnet A lyric of fourteen lines, with a formal rhyme scheme; during its early history, the number of lines varied. Apparently this verse form was devised in Italy during 1220's. Our earliest specimens are hendecasyllables by Giacomo de Lentino of the Sicilian school, usually rhymed abab abab cde. It is limited to the expression of one idea or sentiment which may be amatory, reflective; patriotic, or any other kind. ## Stanza A group of lines of verse (any number; most frequently 4) with a definite metrical and rhyming pattern, which becomes the unit of structure for repetition throughout the poem; also the pattern thus employed. Earlier terms for stanza are "batch" (amount baked at one time) and "stave" (back formation from "stave", pl. of staff). ## Stress Usually interchangeable with "accent". Sometimes distinguished from it, "accent" being used for the forceful syllable in the word by itself, "stress" the emphasis given it by its position in the sentence or the metrical scheme or by its value in the thought. A foot (some now call it a stress-unit) is made up of one stressed syllable and one or two rarely more) unaccented; (unstressed; slack) syllables. ## Symmetry Harmony within the work, of part to part and parts to whole. Sought by most; but a too regular correspondence is felt by many to destroy a certain quality of life (as in handicraft, but lost in the machine-made); hence even races have been marked by symmertrophobia Egyptian temples; Japanese art), and artists (Browning) occasionally prize a ruggedness or roughness above a smooth and rounded symmetry. ## Synecdoche A figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole (as in fifty sails for fifty ships), the whole for a part (as the smiling year for spring).