TERMINOLOGY

TERMINOLOGY


choriamb (n.):  A metrical unit of four syllables, scanned  / u u /.  The term has a long history, but in today's poetry, it's a device or technique which allows an extra syllable to occur in otherwise strict lines of metered poetry.  This is sometimes done to provide relief from the boredom of repetitive sameness (as in lengthy iambic pentameter poems).

   Here are some lines from classic poets Byron and Wordsworth that illustrate the choriamb or what has come to be accepted as choriamb and not technical error.  Examples can be found in Keats and Shelley as well.  

1.     Milton! Thou should’st be living at this hour.  (iambic pentameter – “London, 1802” by Wordsworth)

2.     A traveler between life and death.  (i.tetrameter  – She was a Phantom” by Wordsworth)

3.     On with the dance! Let joy be unconfined.  (i.p. - "There was a Sound of Revelry by Night” by Lord Byron

The first example opens with a choriamb. Likewise the third. The choriamb in the second example falls here:  ler-be-tween-life.  




enjambment (n.):  Also seen as enjambement and enjamming.  Literally, the act of striding over.  In poetry, it is the technique of continuing a phrase or thought beyond the end of the line in a poem. .

      Example:  T. S. Eliot does this in the opening line of The Wasteland.

                        April is the cruelest month, breeding
                        Lilies out of the dead land,  . . . .

Onomatopeoia (n.):  The use of words that sound like what they mean. Examples that come quickly to mind are words like hiss, slam, buzz, whirr, sizzle.  As a poetic device, however, onomatopoeia can be more subtle in its use.  These lines from Tennyson's The Princess show us how.  We hear the murmuring of the bees in the repeated m's:

                        The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
                        And murmuring of innumerable bees.

The classical example, of course, is the line from Poe in which he mentions "the tintinnabulation of the bells." 


Personification (n.): A figure of speech in which human characteristics are attributed to an abstract quality, animal, or inanimate object.

         Examples:

         John Bunyan in Pilgrim's Progress makes characters of Death, Sloth, Piety, etc.

         Shakespeare personifies the moon in these lines:
                   The moon doth with delight
                   look round her when the heavens are bare.

         An owl and a cat are personified in the often anthologized
         poem, The Owl and the Pussycat., 


Please let me know if you want other terms defined and illustrated.

F. Bruce, The Blogger