The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

envelope rhyme A couplet nested in two outer rhymes, as in abba.

envoi A short stanza of summation or conclusion at the end of a poem. Found in certain closed forms, such as the sestina and ballade q.q.v.

epanalepsis General word for repetition or resumption of a theme.

epanaphora Extreme anaphora q.v. As in Wendy Cope’s ‘My Lover’ in which every line begins with the word ‘For’.

epanodos Recapitulation and expansion of an image or idea.

epigram Memorably witty remark, saying or observation.

epistrophe Repetition at the end of clauses or sentences: ‘When I was a child, I spake as I child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child’ etc.

epithalamium A poem celebrating a wedding: nuptial or hymeneal verse. No specific formal requirements. Much the same as prothalamium to be honest.

epode The third part of the Pindaric Ode’s triad. Called by Jonson the stand.

esemplastic Rather fine word coined by Coleridge to describe an unlike imaginative union of two qualities or things.

expletive A word or words used to fill the metrical requirements of a line. The iambic pentameter ‘He thus did sit him down upon the rock’, is saying no more than ‘he sat on the rock’, the other five words are expletives.

fabliau A (sometimes comic) tale, originally medieval French, now applied to any short moral fable in verse or prose.

falling rhythm Metre whose primary movement is from stressed to unstressed, dactylic and trochaic verse, for example.

false friend Word or phrase whose meaning is confused with other words or phrases (often from another language) which sound similar. ‘To meld’ is used often to mean to ‘fuse’ or ‘unite’ through false friendship with ‘melt’ and ‘weld’–it actually means ‘to announce’. Similarly ‘willy-nilly’ is used to mean ‘all over the place’ where in reality it means ‘whether you like it or not’, i.e. ‘willing or unwilling’. Only sad pedants like me care about these misuses which are now common enough to be almost correct.

feedback See loop.

feminine ending An unstressed ending added to an iamb, anapaest or other usually rising foot. Hanging, waiter, television etc.

feminine rhyme The rhyming of feminine-ended words. The rhyme is always on the last stressed syllable. Rhymes for the above could be banging, later, derision.

fescennine Indecent or scurrilous verse.

filidh An Irish bard.

foot A metrical division: five feet to a pentameter, four to a tetrameter etc.

fourteeners Iambic heptameter. Seven iambs make fourteen syllables.

free verse Verse that follows no conventional form, rhyming scheme or metrical pattern.

ghazal Middle Eastern couplet form following special rules as described in Chapter Three.

gematri-a, -ic (Originally Kabbalistic) assignation of numerical value to letters–as in chronogram q.v.

glyconic Latin style of verse usu. with three trochees and a dactyl.

haijin A haiku practitioner.

haikai (no renga) The ancestor of haiku. Playful linked Japanese verse developed from the waka in the sixteenth century.

haiku Three-line verses (in English at least) with a syllable count of 5-7-5 and adhering to certain thematic principles.

hemistich A half-line of verse: the term is most often found in reference to Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry.

hendecasyllabic Composed of eleven syllables.

hendiadys Lit. ‘one through two’: a trope where a single idea is expressed by two nouns where usually it would be a qualified or modified noun: ‘nice and warm’ for ‘nicely warm’, ‘sound and fury’ for ‘furious sound’. Also phrase where ‘and’ replaces infinitive ‘to’ as in ‘try and behave’ for ‘try to behave’.

heptameter A line of verse in seven metrical feet. Fourteeners, for example.

heroic couplets Rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter.

heroic line Iambic pentameter.

heroic verse Poetry cast in heroic couplets.

hexameter A line of verse in six metrical feet.

hokku The opening verse of haikai, from which the haiku is descended.

homeoteleuton Repetition of words ending in like syllables: e.g. ‘readable intelligible syllables are horrible’, ‘a little fiddle in a pickle’ etc.

homostrophic Arrangement of identically structured stanzas, esp. as in Horatian and other ode forms.

Horatian Ode Ode in the manner of the Roman poet Horace, adopted, adapted, translated and imitated in English verse esp. in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Hudibrastic Used to describe the kind of tortured polysyllabic rhyming found in Samuel Butler’s mock-epic Hudibras.