SOME LITERARY TERMS: POETRY

ENGL200 -- Introduction to Literary Study

Prof. Eileen Joy

Fall 2009

Figure 1. Portions of T.S. Eliot's poem "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" written on a college dorm ceiling

SONNET: from the Italian word sonnetto, meaning "little song," a lyric poem that almost always consists of fourteen lines (usually printed as a single stanza) and that typically follows one of several conventional rhyme schemes. Sonnets can address a range of ideas and themes, but love is the sonnet's original subject. The Shakespearean sonnet, derived from Petrarch's Italian sonnet, is fourteen iambic pentameter lines divided into three quatrains and a couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. The form flourished in the Renaissance period, and has often been employed by modern poets, such as W.H. Auden and Pablo Neruda.

GHAZAL: originating in Iran in the tenth century, a poem of five to fifteen couplets (although seven couplets is often the preferred number). There is no enjambment between couplets. Think of each couplet as a separate poem, in which the first line serves the function of the octave of a Petrarchan sonnet and the second line the sestet—that is, there must be a turn, or volta, between lines 1 and 2 of each couplet. One must have a sense that line 2 is amplifying line 1, turning things around, surprising us. Each couplet is like a precious stone that can shine even when plucked from the necklace though it certainly has greater luster in its setting. What links these couplets is a strict formal scheme. This is how it works: the entire ghazal employs the same rhyme and refrain. The rhyme must always immediately precede the refrain. If the rhyme is merely buried somewhere in the line, that will have its charm, of course, but it would not lead to the wonderful pleasure of IMMEDIATE recognition which is central to the ghazal. The refrain may be a word or phrase. Each line must be of the same length (inclusive of the rhyme and refrain). In Urdu and Persian, all the lines are usually in the same meter and have the same metrical length. The last couplet may be (and usually is) a signature couplet in which the poet may invoke his/her name in the first, second, or third person. There is an epigrammatic terseness in the ghazal, but with immense lyricism, evocation, sorrow, heartbreak, wit. What defines the ghazal is a constant longing. When English and American poets employ the ghazal, they usually do not stick to the strict formal scheme, adhering instead to the idea of sets of couplets, in which each couplet is a separate poem, yet all the couplets together also make up "one poem" that addresses a particular theme.

IMAGERY: A term used to refer to: (1) the actual language that a writer uses to convey a visual picture (or, most critics would add, to create or represent any sensory experience); and (2) the use of figures of speech, often to express abstract ideas in a vivid and innovative way. Imagery of this second type makes use of such devices as simile, personification, and metonymy, among many others. Imagery is a central component of almost all imaginative literature and is often said to be the chief element in poetry. Two major types of imagery exist--the literal and the figurative. Literal imagery is purely descriptive, representing any object or event with words that draw on or appeal to the kind of experiences gained through the five senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell). Figurative imagery may call to mind real things that can be perceived by the senses, but it does so as a way of describing something else--often some abstract idea that cannot be be literally or directly described. For example, in Sonnet 16, Shakespeare refers to time as a "bloody tyrant." On one hand, the phrase "bloody tyrant" conjures up a picture of a real tyrant, like a Hitler or a Stalin, with the blood of their victims on them, but it is also a way of conveying how time, which is an abstract concept, is like a "bloody tyrant," in that, in the end, everyone falls victim to the tyranny of time (i.e., time cannot be stopped or argued with--it is like a "tyrant" that way--and in the end it kills all of us--hence, it is "bloody"). Also, when Shakespeare, in Sonnet 18, compares his beloved to a "summer's day," he is both making us think of actual, specific summer days and also getting us to think of youth and beauty as being like summer (warm, golden, full of promise, robust, etc.).

METAPHOR: A figure of speech (more specifically, a trope), or implied comparison, that associates two distinct things; the representation of one thing by another. The image (or activity or concept) used to represent or "figure" something else is the vehicle of the figure of speech; the thing represented is called the tenor. For instance, in the sentence "the man is a mouse," the man is the tenor and the mouse is the vehicle. The image of the mouse is being used to represent to man as timid or cowardly. When Shakespeare writes in Sonnet 3, "For where is she so fair whose uneared womb / Disdains the tillage of your husbandry?" he is making an implied comparison between the act of sexual copulation and the ploughing and tilling of a farm field. Sheakespeare is also using wordplay (or, "punning") with the word "husbandry," which here means both "farming" (as well as "ploughing" in a sexual sense) and "being a husband."

Metaphor should be distinguished from simile, another figure of speech with which it is sometimes confused. Similes compare two distinct things by using a connective word such as "like" or "as." Here is an example of a simile from Shakespeare's Sonnet 60: "Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore, / So do our minutes hasten toward their end". Shakespeare also famously turns the simile on its head in Sonnet 130, where he uses the connective phrase "nothing like" (i.e., "My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun").

SYMBOLISM: from the Greek symballein, meaning "to throw together," the serious and relatively sustained use of symbols to represent or suggest other things or ideas. In addition to referring to an author's explicit use of a particular symbol in a literary work (i.e., Hamlet always wears black, supposedly because he is in mourning for his dead father, but also because the color black symbolizes Hamlet's "dark" disposition), the term symbolism also sometimes refers to the presence, in a work of art or body of works, of suggestive associations giving rise to incremental, implied meaning. Shakespeare's Sonnets demonstrate a real obsession, on the poet's part, with the theme of the power of time over human life and meaning. You might look at all the ways Shakespeare describes and talks about time through the Sonnets. There are some objects and figures that gather symbolic meaning over time because they are used by different artists in different periods, but almost always to signify the same general idea. For example, the image of the snake has been a potent symbol over time for representing death, destruction, and evil, whether in the Bible or Hawthorne's short story "Young Goodman Brown." Check out this really cool online Dictionary of Symbolism.

SYNTAX: The arrangement--the ordering, grouping, and placement--of words within a sentence. Some critics would extend the meaning of the term to encompass such things as the degree of complexity or fragmentation within these arrangements. Syntax is a component of diction, which may refer to word choice or the general character of language used by a speaker or author. The sentences "I rode across the meadow" and "Across the meadow rode I" exhibit different syntax but identical vocabulary. To replace "meadow" with "sea of grass" is to use diction very different from "I rode across the meadow." The combination of unusual syntax and vocabulary often differentiates poetic diction from prose.

The definitions above have been partly pilfered from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms (2nd edition). Other additions are the work of the fevered mind of Prof. Joy.