1. Dominant Metrical Foot used

  • breve (U) and ictus (/)

iamb – a foot made up of a unstressed and a stressed syllable; most dominant foot in English speech (impart and allure)

anapest – a foot made up of 2 unstressed and a stressed syllable (understand and va-va voom)

  • iambs and anapests are examples of rising rhythm since they end with stressed syllables

trochee – stressed and unstressed syllables (fifty and lovely)

dactyl – one stressed followed by two unstressed syllables (telephone and merrily)

  • falling meter since they end with unstressed syllables

spondees — stressed/stressed

pyrrhics — unstressed/unstressed

2. Number of Feet in the Line (see Glossary): trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter (and the Alexandrine, a line of iambic hexameter), heptameter

Other Important terms when scanning a line for meter

  • end-stopped
  • run-on lines (enjambment)
  • caesura

2. Rhyme Scheme

end-rhyme

English sonnet: abab cdcd efef gg

Italian sonnet: abbaabba cdcdcd or cdecde

Ballad stanza: abcb (or abab)

Ottava Rima: abababcc

masculine rhyme

feminine rhyme or “double rhyme”

internal rhyme (womb-tomb)

forced rhyme (eye-symmetry)

eye rhymes (prove-love)

imperfect rhyme (also known as slant rhyme or near rhyme) (lids-lads)

blank verse (see an example of heroic couplet and blank verse)

3. Stanza (see Glossary)

couplet

tercet

quatrain

Other fixed form stanzas: heroic couplet, ballad stanza, octave, sestet, ottava rima, Spenserian stanza, terza rima

4. General Sound Devices

alliteration – repetition of the initial consonant sound; can also occur at the beginning of a stressed syllable

assonance – repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds, especially in stressed syllables, in a sequence of nearby words.

consonance – repetition of a sequence of two or more consonants, but with a change in the intervening vowel: flush/flash, live/love, lean-alone, hearer-horror (sometimes the same thing as imperfect rhyme, as in the Housman poem, “lad/laid” where it links two stanzas)

euphony – language which strikes the ear as smooth, pleasant, and musical

cacophony – language which seems harsh, rough and unmusical

onomatopoeia

  • a word or a sequence of words whose sound resembles that it denotes: i.e. “buzz,” “hiss”
  • can also mean more generally some poetry’s aim to correspond to, or to strongly suggest, what they denote

Rhetorical Figures

anaphora

chiasmus

zeugma