Poetry Notes

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Poetry Notes

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• Couplet - a pair of successive lines of verse,
  especially a pair that rhyme and are of the same
  length.
• Example
• If this be error and upon me proved
• I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

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• Synecdoche - a figure of speech in which a part
  is used for the whole or the whole for a part

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A part referring to the whole

• Referring to people according to a single
  characteristic "the gray beard" for an older man
  or "the long hair" for a hippie
• Describing a complete vehicle as "wheels"
• Calling a worker "a pair of hands"

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A whole thing referring to a part of it

• "The city posted a sign," which means that an
  employee of the local government (but not the
  geographic location or all of its residents)
  posted a sign
• "Capitol Hill," when referring to the US
  Legislature

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Specific class name used to refer to a set of
associated things

• John Hancock" for the signature of any person
• a generic trademark, for example Coke" for any
  variety of cola or Kleenex" for any variety of
  tissue

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The material that a thing is made of referring to
that thing

• "wood" for a type of club used in golf
• "plastic" for credit cards
• "threads" for clothing

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Assonance

• The repetition of vowel sounds
• "Do you like blue?"

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Examples

• Hear the mellow wedding bells Edgar Allan Poe
  The Bells
• That solitude which suits abstruser musings
  Coleridge Dejection An Ode

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Consonance

• Repetition of consonant sounds at the end of
  accented syllables
• "all mammals named Sam are clammy
• The smack cracked my back.

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Note

• Consonance should not be confused with assonance,
  which is the repetition of vowel sounds.
  Alliteration is a special case of consonance
  where the repeated consonant sound is at the
  beginning of each word, as in "few flocked to the
  fight".