NAME:
Poetry Terms
Poetry Unit: ELA sixth grade
TERMS TO KNOW FOR OUR POETRY UNIT
Alliteration - repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words
Atmosphere - mood or overall feeling that a story or poem conveys
Free Verse- lines with no prescribed pattern, structure, or rhyme
Haiku - unrhymed poem of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables; usually includes an
image from nature
Imagery - descriptive or figurative language that creates word pictures (appeals to the five
senses)
Metaphor - compares unlike things by writing or speaking about one thing as if it were
another – Life is a highway.
Meter - Meter is the rhythm established by a poem, and it is usually dependent not only on
the number of syllables in a line but also on the way those syllables are accented. This
rhythm is often described as a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Narrative poem - tells a story with one or more characters, a setting, a conflict, and a series
of events that come to a conclusion
Personification - describes an object, animal, or idea as if it had human characteristics The
wind was growling all night long.
Poem - a work of literature in verse that often, but not necessarily, employs meter, rhyme, or
figurative language in an attempt to communicate an aesthetic experience or statement
Repetition - repeated words
Rhyme - words that have the same sound.
Rhyme Scheme - A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhyming lines in a poem. It is usually
referred to by using letters to indicate which lines rhyme. For example abab indicates a fourline stanza in which the first and third lines rhyme, as do the second and fourth.
Simile - compares unlike things using the word like or as – Life is like an onion.
Speaker - voice behind the poem, point of view
Stanza - a group of lines in a poem; acts like a paragraph in a poem
Symbol - object or action that stands for something beyond itself (Statue of Liberty =
freedom, United States, etc)