See litotes.
melon Sweet pleasant fruit. What possible reason can it have for being in this glossary? Andrew Marvell stumbled on them as he passed, but otherwise they have no business being here. Please ignore this entry.
melopoeia Word coined by Ezra Pound to describe the overall soundscape of a poem.
mesostich Halfway point of a line–used to apply to acrostics that descend therefrom.
metaphor Figurative use of a word or phrase to describe something to which it is not literally applicable. ‘The ship ploughed through the waves’, ‘Juliet is the sun’, ‘there’s April in her eyes’ etc.
metonym A metaphoric trope in which a word or phrase is used to stand in for what it represents: ‘the bottle’ is a metonym for ‘drinking’, ‘the stage’ for ‘theatrical life’, ‘Whitehall’ for the civil service etc. Kennings q.v. and synecdoche are often metonymic.
minuscule non capital letters. lower case.
molossus A ternary foot of three long, or stressed, units. ‘Short sharp shock’, etc.
monody Ode or dirge sung or declaimed by a single individual.
monometer A metric line of one foot.
monosyllable Let me say this in words of one sill ab uhl.
mora From Lat. for ‘delay’. In syllable-timed languages the duration of one short syllable. Two morae make a long syllable. Equivalent of crotchet and minim in music.
Muses Nine multi-domiciled girls (the daughters of Mnemosyne or Memory) who shuttle between Pieria, Parnassus and Mount Helicon and give poets and others inspiration. Erato helps us with our Love Poetry, Calliope with our epics, Melpomene with our tragedies, Polyhymnia is good for sacred verse and Thalia for comedy. For non-poets Clio looks after History and Renault motor cars, Euterpe is in charge of music, Terpsichore is the dance mistress and Urania teaches astronomy.
near rhyme Echoic devices such as assonance, consonance and homeoteleuton q.q.v
negative capability Keats’s phrase (used in a letter of 1818 and referring to Shakespeare after being inspired by Kean’s performance as Richard III) ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. A phrase now used to describe the poetic ability to efface self and take on the qualities being described.
nonce word A word coined for use on one occasion: not a nonsense word–that would be a false friend q.v.
nonet No, no. Silly verse form of ascending or diminishing syllabic count.
numbers A now archaic word for lines of verse.
objective correlative Phrase coined by T. S. Eliot in a 1919 essay on Hamlet to refer to the context of an emotion, the pattern of events, diction etc. leading to an emotional response. Now often used to mean the poet’s intended emotional effect. Eliot felt that Hamlet lacked an o. c.
octameter A metric line of eight feet.
octave The first eight lines of a (usually Petrarchan or Petrarchan variant) sonnet.
ode Verse form on one theme, now usually applied to lyric poems.
Old English Anglo-Saxon (approx. fifth–twelfth century). Applies to four-stress hemistichal alliterative accentual verse, e.g. Beowulf.
onomatopoei-a, -ic Of words whose sounds imitate their meaning: e.g. ‘click’, ‘hiss’, ‘susurration’ etc.
open form Metrical rhymed verse where issues like the number of stanzas are not fixed, but up to the poet.
ottava rima An open form of eight-line verse rhyming abababcc. Byron’s Don Juan, late Yeats etc.
oxymoron Lit. ‘sharp blunt’ a contradictory phrase: as in Romeo and Juliet’s ‘O loving hate! O heavy lightness!’, or a paradoxical phrase such as ‘eloquent silence’, ‘living death’ or ‘military intelligence’ (ho-ho).
paean A song of praise, encomium.
palilogy Repetition–what a lot of words for it there are.
panegyric Writing in praise of a character’s specific qualities or achievements.
pantoum Malayan closed form with refrained lines. See Chapter Three.
paragram To hide a name or word inside text. ‘A cut and paSTEPHENomenon’, or’ Sui TablE Poetic HiddEN word’.
paralepsis To say something while pretending not to: ‘I shall not mention his
