An Appendix of Literary Terms

One day, as I wrote fervently, A passing thought occurred to me That- purely theoretically, With just a pinch of subtlety And the right amount of irony- These lists of terminology Disguised as a soliloquy (Ignoring minor fallacy) Could be written as a poem. So… here goes. Allusion speaks of something else, And hopes you catch its meaning, Alliteration repeats a sound Like ‘Pirate’s parrots prefer preening.’ Antagonists get in the way Of Hamlet and Othello Good Hamlet used apostrophe To speak with a rotting fellow Approximate rhyme approximates The rhyming of a word The audience hears a murmured aside, And is of the truth assured A ballad is a narrative poem And is quite similar to an Ode Cacophony is rough and nasty It’s used quite often to forebode And Caesura pauses A chorus is a group affair And tells of some emotion Climax is the highest point And often culminates all motion Coincidence occurs When things relate by chance And comedy is mostly found In humans and grievance A conflict is a battlefield Of action or idea A couplet couples rhyming lines Like Tony and Maria Connotation’s a piece of cake (As long as you can eat it!) But denotation strips a word To the definition as you read it And the continuous form carries on Didactic poems are pious And really rather preachy Dilemmas pose a tricky choice Where neither path is peachy End-stop lines are hemmed in By some type of punctuation Euphony flows in softer tones Like gentle precipitation Falling action bridges the gap Between climax and conclusion Fantasy is a constructed world Based upon illusion A farce is blunter in its wit It’s full of improbability A figure of speech is a phrase That shouldn’t be taken literally And suspense leaves you hanging… Speaking in first person Illuminates inner thought Free verse is the plebian Whose structure skills are shot Haikus are more stilted Five to seven and back again Happy endings make you smile Heroes have won and boys are men Imagery paints a pretty picture Of an adventure sensory Irony relies the most On points of incongruity Internal rhyme’s within the line Like ‘Many men are misers’ Hexameter contains six feet But pentameter’s a fiver And indeterminate ending is Melodrama est tres dramatic Though it ends quite happily Metaphor compares two things But you have to look to see Metonymy is a single thing (The White House has gone nutty!) The moral calls for fibrous points In a world that’s long been putty Drama has a narrator Who comments on the action And a nonrealistic drama Presents a falsified faction Onomatopoeia is a sound Like Bing! Boom! Bam! and Bang! Overstatement is the best It rules the world! Hot dang! And no one knows a mystery Paradoxes contradict And turn the ‘Off’ switch ‘On’ Paraphrase is clear and crisp Much like a pithy song Objects are personified To make the treetops sing Protagonist’s the central guy Like Frodo and his ring Prose is simply any piece That is not set in verse Realistic drama is mundane And stays within this universe A refrain is a word, phrase, or line That pops up repeatedly Rhythm is a wave-like sound Repeated continually And what is, really, a rhetorical question? Rising action builds the plot Of any story worth its ink And run-on lines run on and on and on and don’t ever really stop once you’ve reached the End of the line but they just keeps going and going until the poet runs out of paper or falls asleep or something Sarcasm is quite useless And no one even really likes it Satire seeks to reform By ridiculing humans through lit Many tears are brought about By use of sentimentality Setting tells us basic things Time and place and locality Sonnets are in fourteen lines Though there’s Shakespeare and Italian Similes use ‘like’ and ‘as’ As in, ‘This poem is quite like valium!’ Surprise ending! Not really. Soliloquies are spoken alone Faustus dearly loves ‘em Static characters hang around Much like a cold and phlegm Symbols mean something more Than that they appear to be Theme is the author’s central point The crowning fleur-de-lis Tone gives off emotion Held by the main speaker Tragedy is full of death There’s really nothing bleaker Understatement’s pretty good If you’re into that sort of thing Verse means something metric Like poems, or songs to sing And end rhyme stops.