Elements of

Poetry
Antonia D. Entino-Señorita
Faculty Language and Literature Department

Nova Mae Quinte

Eltricia Samalague
Student Interns, Bachelor of Arts in English Language
Poetry
 can be defined as 'literature in a
metrical form' or 'a composition
forming rhythmic lines'.
 Compared to prose, where there is no
such restriction, and the content of the
piece flows according to story
 a poem may or may not have a story,
but definitely has a structured method
of writing.
Rhythm and meter are the building
blocks of poetry. Rhythm is the
pattern of sound created by the
varying length and emphasis given to
different syllables. The rise and fall of
spoken language is called its
cadence.
Example "Shall I compare thee to a summer's
day?" - Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare
In this line, the rhythm follows an iambic
pentameter pattern, which means there are
five pairs of stressed and unstressed
syllables. "SHALL I comPARE THEE to SUM-
mer's DAY?“
Meter is the rhythmic pattern created in a line of
verse. There are four basic kinds of meter:
Accentual (strong-stress) meter: The
number of stressed syllables in a line is fixed,
but the number of total syllables is not. This
kind of meter is common in Anglo-Saxon
poetry, such as Beowulf. Gerard Manley
Hopkins developed a form of accentual meter
called sprung rhythm, which had
considerable influence on 20th-century
Example "Tyger! Tyger! burning bright" - "The
Tyger" by William Blake

"TY-ger! TY-ger! BURN-ing BRIGHT"

Syllabic meter: The number of total syllables
in a line is fixed, but the number of stressed
syllables is not. This kind of meter is relatively
rare in English poetry.
Example The Japanese haiku is an example of
syllabic meter. It consists of a tercet (three-line
poem) with the first line containing five syllables, the
second line containing seven syllables, and the final
line returning to the five-syllable count .
Accentual-syllabic meter is determined by the
number and type of feet in a line of verse.
Iambic pentameter: Each line of verse has five feet
(pentameter), each of which consists of an
unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable
(iamb). Iambic pentameter is one of the most
popular metrical schemes in English poetry.
Accentual-syllabic meter: Both the number
of stressed syllables and the number of total
syllables is fixed. Accentual-syllabic meter has
been the most common kind of meter in
English poetry since Chaucer in the late Middle
Ages.
 Types of Accentual-Syllabic Meter
Iambic pentameter: Each line of verse has five
feet (pentameter), each of which consists of an
unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable
(iamb). Iambic pentameter is one of the most
popular metrical schemes in English poetry.
Blank verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank
verse bears a close resemblance to the rhythms of
ordinary speech, giving poetry a natural feel.
Shakespeare’s plays are written primarily in blank
verse.
Ballad: Alternating tetrameter and trimeter, usually
iambic and rhyming. Ballad form, which is common
in traditional folk poetry and song, enjoyed a revival
in the Romantic period with such poems as Samuel
Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner.”
Free verse: Verse that does not conform to any
fixed meter or rhyme scheme. Free verse is not,
however, loose or unrestricted: its rules of
composition are as strict and difficult as traditional
verse, for they rely on less evident rhythmic
patterns to give the poem shape. Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass is a seminal work of free verse.
Quantitative meter: The duration of
sound of each syllable, rather than its
stress, determines the meter.
Quantitative meter is common in Greek,
Latin, Sanskrit, and Arabic but not in
English.
Example, "How They Brought the Good
News from Ghent to Aix“ by Robert
Browning
"I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he“.
 THE FOOT
 is the basic rhythmic unit into which a line of
verse can be divided.
 When reciting verse, there usually is a slight
pause between feet. When this pause is
especially pronounced, it is called a caesura.
The process of analyzing the number and type
of feet in a line is called scansion.
 These are the most common types of feet in
English poetry.

Iamb: An unstressed syllable followed by a

stressed syllable: “to day ”
Trochee: A stressed syllable followed by an
unstressed syllable: “ car ry”
Dactyl: A stressed syllable followed by two
unstressed syllables: “ diff icult”
Anapest: Two unstressed syllables followed
by a stressed syllable: “it is time ”
Spondee: Two successive syllables with
strong stresses: “stop, thief”
Pyrrhic: Two successive syllables with light
stresses: “up to”
Most English poetry has four or five
feet in a line, but it is not uncommon to see
as few as one or as many as eight.
Monometer (One foot)
 is often used for emphasis, brevity, or as a
stylistic choice to create a specific effect. It can
convey a sense of surprise, pain, or a sudden
burst of emotion in a concise manner.
Example Ouch!
Dimeter (Two feet)
 is a poetic meter that consists of two metrical
feet, or two stressed syllables, per line.
Trimeter ( Three feet)
 is a poetic meter that consists of three
metrical feet, or three stressed syllables, per
line.
Tetrameter: Four feet
Example "Two ROADS diVERGED in a YELlow
WOOD"
Pentameter: Five feet
Example "SHALL i com-PARE THEE to a SUM-
mer's DAY?"
Hexameter: Six feet
Heptameter: Seven feet
Octameter: Eight feet
Line and Stanza
 Poetry generally is divided into lines of
verse. A grouping of lines, equivalent to a
paragraph in prose, is called a stanza. On the
printed page, line breaks normally are used to
separate stanzas from one another.

Rhyme: A poem may or may not have a rhyme.

When you write poetry that has rhyme, it means
that the last words or sounds of the lines match
with each other in some form.
 Rhyme is basically similar sounding words like 'cat'
and 'hat', 'close' and 'shows', 'house' and 'mouse',
etc. Free verse poetry, though, does not follow this
system.

Types of Rhyme
 One common way of creating a sense of
musicality between lines of verse is to make them
rhyme.
End rhyme: A rhyme that comes at the end of a
line of verse. Most rhyming poetry uses end
rhymes.
Internal rhyme: A rhyme between two or more
words within a single line of verse, as in “God’s
Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins: “And all is
seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil.”
Masculine rhyme: A rhyme consisting of a single
stressed syllable, as in the rhyme between “car”
and “far.”
Feminine rhyme: A rhyme consisting of a stressed
syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, as in
the rhyme between “mother” and “brother.”
Perfect rhyme: An exact match of sounds in a
rhyme.
Slant rhyme: An imperfect rhyme, also called
oblique rhyme or off rhyme, in which the sounds
are similar but not exactly the same, as between
“port” and “heart.” Modern poets often use slant
rhyme as a subtler alternative to perfect rhyme.
 Rhyme Schemes
Rhyme Scheme
 is also one of the basic elements of poetry. In
simple words, it is defined as the pattern of
rhyme. Either the last words of the first and
second lines rhyme with each other, or the first
and the third, second and the fourth and so on. It
is denoted by alphabets like aabb (1st line
rhyming with 2nd, 3rd with 4th); abab (1st with
3rd, 2nd with 4th); abba (1st with 4th, 2nd with
3rd), etc.
 Here are some of the most common
rhyme schemes.
Couplet: Two successive rhymed lines
that are equal in length. A heroic couplet
is a pair of rhyming lines in iambic
pentameter. In Shakespeare’s plays,
characters often speak a heroic couplet
before exiting, as in these lines from
Hamlet: “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, /
That ever I was born to set it right!”

Quatrain: A four-line stanza. The most common

form of English verse, the quatrain has many
variants. One of the most important is the heroic
quatrain, written in iambic pentameter with an
ABAB rhyme scheme.
Tercet: A grouping of three lines, often bearing a
single rhyme.
Terza rima: A system of interlaced tercets linked
by common rhymes: ABA BCB CDC etc. Dante
pioneered terza rima in The Divine Comedy. The
form is hard to maintain in English, although there
are some notable exceptions, such as Percy
Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.”
 Other Techniques
Punctuation: Like syllable stresses and
rhyme, punctuation marks influence the
musicality of a line of poetry.
 When there is a break at the end of a
line denoted by a comma, period,
semicolon, or other punctuation mark, that
line is end-stopped.
 In enjambment, a sentence or clause runs
onto the next line without a break.
 Enjambment creates a sense of suspense or
excitement
 gives added emphasis to the word at the end of
the line, as in John Keats’s “Ode to a
Nightingale”: “Thy plaintive anthem fades / Past
the near meadows, over the still stream.”
Figure of speech
 the use of a word or words diverging from its
usual meaning. It can also be a special
repetition, arrangement or omission of words
with literal meaning, or a phrase with a
specialized meaning not based on the literal
meaning of the words in it, as idiom, metaphor,
simile, hyperbole, or personification.
 Figures of speech often provide emphasis,
freshness of expression, or clarity.
Repetition: Words, sounds, phrases, lines, or
elements of syntax may repeat within a poem.
Sometimes, repetition can enhance an element
of meaning, but at other times it can dilute or
dissipate meaning.

Alliteration: The repetition of sounds in initial

stressed syllables.
Assonance: The repetition of vowel sounds
Refrain: A phrase or group of lines that is repeated
at significant moments within a poem, usually at
the end of a stanza.
Poetic Forms
 Certain traditional forms of poetry have a
distinctive stanza length combined with a
distinctive meter or rhyme pattern. Here are
some popular forms.
Stanza: Stanza in poetry is defined as a smaller
unit or group of lines or a paragraph in a poem. A
particular stanza has a specific meter, rhyme
scheme, etc. Based on the number of lines,
stanzas are named as couplet (2 lines), Tercet (3
lines), Quatrain (4 lines), Cinquain (5 lines), Sestet
(6 lines), Septet (7 lines), Octave (8 lines).
Haiku: A compact form of Japanese poetry
written in three lines of five, seven, and five
syllables, respectively.

Limerick: A fanciful five-line poem with an

AABBA rhyme scheme in which the first,
second, and fifth lines have three feet and the
third and fourth have two feet.
Ottava rima: In English, an eight-line stanza
with iambic pentameter and the rhyme scheme
ABABABCC. This form is difficult to use in
English, where it is hard to find two rhyming
triplets that do not sound childish. Its effect is
majestic yet simple. William Butler Yeats’s poem
“Among School Children” uses ottava rima.
Sestina: Six six-line stanzas followed by a
three-line stanza. The same six words are
repeated at the end of lines throughout the
poem in a predetermined pattern. The last word
in the last line of one stanza becomes the last
word of the first line in the next. All six endwords
appear in the final three-line stanza. Sir Philip
Sidney’s Arcadia contains examples of the
sestina.
Sonnet: A single-stanza lyric poem containing
fourteen lines written in iambic pentameter. In
some formulations, the first eight lines (octave)
pose a question or dilemma that is resolved in the
final six lines (sestet). There are three predominant
sonnet forms.
Italian or Petrarchan sonnet: Developed by the
Italian poet Petrarch, this sonnet is divided into an
octave with the rhyme scheme ABBAABBA or
ABBACDDC and a sestet with the rhyme scheme
CDECDE or CDCCDC.
Shakespearean sonnet: Also called the English
sonnet or Elizabethan sonnet, this poetic form,
which Shakespeare made famous, contains three
quatrains and a final couplet. The rhyme scheme is
ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.
Spenserian sonnet: A variant that the poet
Edmund Spenser developed from the
Shakespearean sonnet. The Spenserian sonnet
has the rhyme scheme ABAB BCBCCDCD EE.
Villanelle: A nineteen-line poem made up of five
tercets and a final quatrain in which all nineteen
lines carry one of only two rhymes. There are two
refrains, alternating between the ends of each
tercet and then forming the last two lines of the
quatrain. Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into
That Good Night” is a famous example.
Theme: This is what the poem is all about. The
theme of the poem is the central idea that the poet
wants to convey. It can be a story, or a thought, or a
description of something or someone; anything that
the poem is about, expressed through the use of
denotation or/and connotation meaning of words.

Symbolism: Often poems will convey ideas and

thoughts using symbols. A symbol can stand for
many things at one time and leads the reader out
of a systematic and structured method of
looking at things. Often a symbol used in the
poem will be used to create such an effect.

Imagery
 is also one of the important elements of a
poem. This device is used by the poet for
readers to create an image in their
imagination. Imagery appeals to all the five
senses.
For e.g., when the poet describes, 'the flower is
bright red', an image of a red flower is
immediately created in the reader's mind

The elements of poetry are an essential

part of the structure of a good poem. Of course,
it does not mean, that all poems must have all
these elements. It depends entirely upon the
poet, who has all these tools at his disposal to
use in order to convey his ideas effectively.
THANK YOU!