septain A stanza of seven lines.
sestet A stanza of six lines; also the final six lines of a (usually) Petrarchan sonnet.
sestina A closed verse form in six stanzas and an envoi determined by rules of some complexity. See the section devoted to it in Chapter Three.
Shakespearean sonnet The native English sonnet form adapted by Drayton, Sidney and others which found its apotheosis at the hands of Will. It rhymes abab cdcd efef gg.
shaped poem See pattern poems.
shasei The ‘sketch of nature’ that a haiku is supposed to render.
Skeltonics Merry, rather clumsy subversive and scurrilous irregular verses, named after John S. (fifteenth–sixteenth-century English poet). Sometimes called tumbling verse.
slam Originally Chicagoan poetry contests or public recitals of verse held as entertainment events.
slant-rhyme See partial rhyme.
song that luc bat A version of luc bat.
sonnet A poem of fourteen lines, usually following a particular scheme, e.g. Petrarchan, Shakespearean, Spenserian or variations thereof.
sonnet of sonnets A sequence of fourteen sonnets.
sonnet redouble A fifteen-poem corona sequence in which the fifteenth is made of the last lines of the previous fourteen. Something to do between lunch and tea.
Spenserian sonnet Close to Shakespearean s., but with vestigial Petrarchan internal couplets: abab bcbc cdcd ee.
Spenserian stanza An open stanzaic form in iambic pentameter developed by Spenser for The Faerie Queen and later used by Keats and Tennyson. It rhymes ababbcbcc and features a final line in iambic hexameter, an alexandrine.
spondee A metrical unit of two stressed feet. Or long feet if you’re an ancient Greek.
sprung rhythm A phrase coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins to describe verse in which only the stresses are counted. See the section on it towards the end of Chapter One.
stand A place to put a cake. Or, Ben Jonson’s word for epode.
stanza, stanzaic What a verse is to a hymn or song, so a stanza is to a poem.
stave Sometimes used to refer to a stanza.
stichic Of or in lines: how a poem is presented as distinct to prose. Christopher Ricks once said the real defining difference between prose and poetry was that whereas prose has to go to the end of a line, with poetry it’s an option. Reductive logic at its best.
stichomythia Verse presented as dialogue, often rapidly alternating between speakers. In verse drama refers to dialogue of single lines rather than speeches.
stress The feeling that comes upon an author when he knows he must deliver a book to his publisher when it isn’t quite finished yet and there’s a glossary to be completed.
strophe The first part of a Pindaric Ode’s triad. What Jonson called the turn.
substitutions The use of an alien metric foot in a line of otherwise regular metrical pattern. Pyrrhic and trochaic substitutions are common in iambic verse, for example.
suspension of disbelief Term coined by Coleridge to describe a reader’s willingness to accept as true what clearly is not.
syllable, syllabic The basic sound unit of a word. Come on, you know perfectly well. Of poetry it refers to forms that are predicated on their syllabic count rather than any metric considerations. The haiku and the tanaga, for example.
syllepsis Kind of zeugma q.v. where a verb governs two unlikely nouns or phrases: as in ‘he left in a cab and a temper’, and Pope’s ‘Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade’.
synaeresis A gliding of two syllables into one: in the opening line of Paradise Lost ‘Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit’ d becomes the four-syllable ‘disobedyence’. Also called synaloepha.
synaloepha Look up at the preceding entry.
syncope The elision of a syllable from a word: ‘prob’ly’ for ‘probably’ etc.
synecdoche A figure of speech in which the part stands in for the whole or vice versa: e.g. ‘England won the Ashes’ where ‘England’ means the English Cricket XI, ‘twenty hands’, where ‘hand’
