The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

synecdoche A figure of speech in which the part stands in for the whole or vice versa: e.g. ‘England won the Ashes’ where ‘England’ means the English Cricket XI, ‘twenty hands’, where ‘hand’ stands for a crewman etc.

syzygy High score at Scrabble that means a pair of connected or corresponding things. Two hemistichs make a syzygy, you might say, or a plug and a socket together. In poetics also refers to multiple alliteration and consonance, as in the Ms in Tennyson’s ‘The moan of doves in immemorial elms/And murmuring of innumerable bees’ (from ‘The Princess’).

tanaga A syllabic Filipino verse form.

tanka A syllabic Japanese cinquain form of verse. The count is 5-7-5-7-7.

telestich An acrostic where it is the last letters that do the spelling out.

teleuton The terminating element of a line.

tercet A three-line stanza.

ternary A foot composed of three metrical elements. Anapaest, dactyl, amphimacer etc.

terza rima An open stanzaic form with interlocking cross-rhyming. Used by Dante for his Inferno.

tetractys Bizarre form of syllabic verse developed by Mr Stebbing.

tetrameter A four-stress line.

transferred epithet Illogical (often comic) use of image, transferring meaning from mood of person to object: ‘I lit a moody cigarette’, ‘sad elms’ etc.

triad, triadic The three-part structure of Pindaric Odes. Each triad consists of strophe, antistrophe and epode or turn, counter-turn and stand as Ben Jonson dubbed them. Originated as actual physical movements in Greek choric dances.

tribrach Ternary unit of three unstressed syllables. Forget it.

trimeter A three-stress line.

triolet A closed French form of some sweetness. Or perhaps it’s just the name. It rhymes ABaAbbAB where A and B are rentrements.

triple rhyme Tri-syllabic (usually dactylic) rhyme, merited/inherited, eternal/infernal, merrier/terrier etc.

triplet Three-line couplet, aaa, bbb etc. Augustan poets braced them in a curly bracket.

trochee A binary metrical unit of stressed and unstressed syllables:

.

trope Any rhetorical or poetic trick, device or figure of speech that changes the literal meaning of words. Metaphor and other common figures are tropes.

tumbling verse See Skeltonics.

turn Ben Jonson’s word for a strophe.

twiner Term used by Walter de la Mare to describe a kind of double limerick form.

ubi sunt Lit. ‘where are they?’ Poetic formula addressing something vanished: ‘Where are the songs of Spring?’ (Keats, ‘Ode to Autumn’), ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan? Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ (Ballade by François Villon).

vatic A poetic prophecy.

Venus and Adonis Stanza A six-line stanzaic form of iambic pentameter that takes its name from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. It rhymes ababcc. Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ etc.

vers libre French for free verse.

vignette In poetry, a delicate but precise scene or description.

villanelle See section devoted to it in Chapter Three.

virgule In metrics, the mark used for foot division.

volta The ‘turn’ marking the change of mood or thought between the (Petrarchan) sonnet’s octave and sestet q.q.v.

Vorticism Word coined by Pound for British phalanx of the modernist movement. Most often used to refer to work (in paint and verse) of Wyndham Lewis. They had their own fanzine–Blast!. Rejection of sentimentality and verbal profusion.

waka Original Japanese verse from which haikai and haiku descended.

weak ending See feminine ending, but take no offence therefrom.

wrenched accent Sound and sense of words vitiated by the need for them to fit the metre.

wrenched rhyme A word forced out of its natural pronunciation by its need to rhyme.

wretched rhyme Bad rhyme.

wretched sinner Me.

zeugma Lit. ‘yoking’: ‘she wore a Chanel dress and an expression of disappointment’. Essentially the same as syllepsis q.v. The differences between them are trivial and undecided.

zymurgy Word that always tries to get into glossaries and dictionaries last but is often beaten by zythum, which, ironically perhaps, it helps create. Something to do with fermentation. More connected to Yeast than Yeats.

zythum Ancient Egyptian beer.

APPENDIX

Arnaut’s Algorithm

The line-ends of the first stanza (A, B, C, D, E and F) are chosen for the second and subsequent stanzas according to a ‘spiral’ algorithm illustrated in Figure 1. It can be seen that the position and relative order of the line ending alters in a complex manner from stanza to stanza.

Figure 1: The ‘spiral’ algorithm