PSSA+Poetry+Terms

1. **Alliteration**: the repetition of one or more initial sounds, usually consonants, in words within a line. Bright black-eyed creature, brushed with brown. (Robert Frost, “To a Moth Seen in Winter”) 2. **Allusion**: a reference to an outside fact, event, or other source. World-famous golden-thighed Pythagorus Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings What a star sang and careless Muses heard (Pythagorus - Greek mathematician; Muses - mythological goddesses of beauty and music) (William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children”) 3. **Assonance**: repetition of two or more vowel sounds within a line. Burnt the fire of thine eyes (William Blake, “The Tiger”) 4. **Hyperbole**: gross exaggeration for effect; overstatement. Love you ten years before the Flood, And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. (Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”) 5. **Imagery**: the use of word to represent things, actions, or ideas by sensory description. Night after Night Her purple traffic Strews the land with Opal Bales - Merchantmen - poise upon Horizons - Dip - and vanish like Orioles! (Emily Dickenson, “This Is the Land Where Sunset Washes”) 6. **Metaphor**: a figure of speech that makes a direct comparison of unlike objects by identification or substitution. All the world’s a stage (William Shakespeare, As You LIke It) 7. **Personification**: a figure of speech in which objects and animals are given human qualities. When it comes, the landscape listens, Shadows hold their breath. (Emily Dickenson, “A Certain Slant of Light”) 8. **Simile**: a direct comparison of two unlike objects, using like or as. The holy time is quiet as a nun (William Wordsworth, “On the Beach at Calais”) 9. **Theme**: the dominant, core meaning of the poem. The theme of the poem is the abstract idea upon which the poem is built, rendering it concrete through the speaker, events, or images within the poem. 10. **Tone**: the author’s attitude or emotion toward his / her audience and subject. 11. Onomatopoeia: the use of a word whose sound suggest its meaning. The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard (Robert Frost, “Out, Out”) 12. **Symbolism**: the use of one subject to suggest another, hidden object or idea. In Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”, the fork in the road represents a major decision in life, each road a separate way of life.