end-rhyming The rhyming of final words, or final stressed syllables in lines of verse. Usual rhyming, in fact.
end-stopped Lines of verse which do not run on in sense, but whose thought ends with the line. Lines without enjambment q.v.
enjambment The running-on of sense over the end of a line of verse. Verse that is not end-stopped q.v.
entry Just testing to see whether you had got to q.v. q.v. yet.
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.
