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S
Sapphic Verse
See Ode.
Satire
A literary work, which exposes and ridicules human vices or folly.
Historically perceived as tending toward didacticism, it is usually
intended as a moral criticism directed against the injustice of social
wrongs. It may be written with witty jocularity or with anger and
bitterness.
Scan
To mark off lines of poetry into rhythmic units, or feet, to provide a
visual representation of their metrical structure.
Scansion
The analysis of a poem's meter. This is usually done by marking the
stressed and unstressed syllables in each line and then, based on the
pattern of the stresses, dividing the line into feet.
Scheme
Figure of speech that varies the order and sound of words. Examples
include alliteration, assonance, chiasmus, and rhyme.
Scop
The name for an Old English poet-singer.
Senryu
A short Japanese poem that is similar to a haiku in structure but treats
human beings rather than nature, often in a humorous or satiric way.
Sense Pause
See Caesura
Septenarius
A verse consisting of seven feet.
Septet
A seven-line stanza. See also Rhyme royal.
Serenade
A lover's song or poem of the evening.
Serpentine Verses
Verses ending with the same word with which they begin.
Sestet
A six-line stanza, or the final six lines of a 14-line Italian or Petrarchan
sonnet.
Sestina
This French form consists of thirty-nine lines. There are six six-line
stanzas and it usually concludes with a triplet. There is no restriction on
line length though it traditionally is written in iambic pentameter. The
first stanza has six lines. The word that ends each of the six lines must
also end the lines of the five following stanzas in a particular pattern.
The pattern would look like this if you numbered the lines. Stanza 1—
123456 Stanza 2—615243 Stanza 3—364125 Stanza 4—532614
Stanza 5—451362 Stanza 6—246531. The concluding triplet Line 1
uses the words from 2 and 5 Line 2 uses the words from 4 and 3 Line
3 uses the words from 1 and 6.
Sextain
A stanza or poem or six lines.
Shakespearean Sonnet
The Shakespearean sonnet is another variation of the fourteen-line
poem consisting of three quatrains and a final couplet written in iambic
pentameter with a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg. The third
quatrain is marked by a change in the poem’s tone or the introduction
of a revelation or epiphany.
Shaped Verse
See Pattern Poetry
Sick Verse
Mordant, black-humoured or horrific works such as Edgar Allan Poe's
"The Raven," Robert Browning's "`Childe Roland to the Dark Tower
Came'," and Robert Service's "The Cremation of Sam McGee." This term
was popularized by George Macbeth's anthology Penguin Book of Sick
Verse (1963).
Sight Rhyme
Words which are similar in spelling but different in pronunciation, like
mow and how or height and weight. Some words that are sight rhymes
today did have a correspondence of sound in earlier stages of the
language.
Sigmatism
The intentional repetition of words with sibilant speech sounds closely
spaced in a line of poetry.
Sijo
This Korean style was originally called tanga. This form, like the haiku, is
founded in natural themes and a short structure. However,
metaphysical and astronomical themes are also investigated. The lines
average fourteen to sixteen syllables, for a total of anywhere from forty-
four to forty-six. When spoken, there is a pause in the middle of the
line. In English, they are often printed as six lines rather than three.
The first line is used to introduce a situation. The second line develops
it and the third line provides a conclusion with a twist to resolve the
tension and provides an enduring ending.
Silent Stress
A noticeable pause or musical rest with all the value of a beat in highly
rhythmic verse. An example is the caesura that appears at the end of
the first lines in (spoken-aloud) nursery rhymes.
Simile
A figure of speech in which two things are compared using the word
"like" or "as." An example of a simile using like occurs in Langston
Hughes's poem Harlem: "What happens to a dream deferred?/ Does it
dry up/ like a raisin in the sun?"
Singlet
A one-syllable foot.
Skald
An ancient Scandinavian poet or bard.
Skeltonic Verse
Short, roughhewn lines in variable-length stanzas reusing a small
number of rhymes, popularized by John Skelton.
Slack
Unstressed syllable.
Slant Rhyme
See Near Rhyme
Society Verse
A short lyrical poem written in an urbane manner or crisp, animated and
typically ironic light verse dealing with contemporaneous topics.
Sociological Criticism
An approach to literature that examines social groups, relationships,
and values as they are manifested in literature. Sociological approaches
emphasize the nature and effect of the social forces that shape power
relationships between groups or classes of people. Such readings treat
literature as either a document reflecting social conditions or a product
of those conditions. The former view brings into focus the social milieu;
the latter emphasizes the work. Two important forms of sociological
criticism are Marxist and feminist approaches.
Solecism
An impropriety of speech; a violation of the established rules of syntax.
Soliloquy
A talking to oneself; the discourse of a person speaking to himself,
whether alone or in the presence of others. It gives the illusion of being
unspoken reflections.
Sonnet
A lyric poem that is 14 lines long. Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnets are
divided into two quatrains and a six-line "sestet," with the rhyme
scheme abba abba cdecde (or cdcdcd). English (or Shakespearean)
sonnets are composed of three quatrains and a final couplet, with a
rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg. English sonnets are written
generally in iambic pentameter.
Sonnet Redoublé
Fifteen sonnets, of which the last consists of all the repeated lines
linking the other fourteen sonnets, in the same order in which they
have appeared.
Sonnet Sequence
A group of sonnets sharing the same subject matter and sometimes a
dramatic situation and persona. Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and W. H. Auden have written among the
greatest sonnet sequences.
Sonneteer
A composer of sonnets; also, the term is sometimes applied to a minor
or insignificant poet.
Sotadic or Sotadean
See Palindrome
Sound Devices
Resources used by writers of verse to convey and reinforce the
meaning or experience of poetry through the skillful use of sound.
Sound Symbolism
See Phonetic Symbolism
Spasmodic School
P. J. Bailey, Sydney Dobell, Alexander Smith and other late Romantic,
early Victorian minor poets.
Spenserian Sonnet
A fourteen-line poem developed by Edmund Spenser in his Amoretti
that varies the English form by interlocking the three quatrains, abab
bcbc cdcd ee
Spenserian Stanza
The unit of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, consisting of eight iambic-
pentameter lines and a final alexandrine, and having the rhyme scheme
ababbcbcc, or two interlaced quatrains overlapping with a concluding
couplet. Later examples are Robert Burns' "The Cottager's Saturday
Night," John Keats' "The Eve of St. Agnes," Percy Bysshe Shelley's
"Adonais," and Alfred lord Tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters."
Split Rhyme
See Broken Rhyme
Spondee
A spondee is a metrical foot used in types of poetry. It consists of two
stressed syllables (//).
Sprung Rhyme
A poetic rhythm characterized by feet varying from one to four syllables
which are equal in time length but different in the number of syllables. It
has only one stress per foot, falling on the first syllable, or on the only
syllable if there is but one, which produces the frequent juxtaposition
of single accented syllables.
Sprung Rhythm
A metrical system devised by Gerard Manley Hopkins that has 1-to-4-
syllable feet, each starting with a stressed syllable (sometimes a foot by
itself), where the spondee replaces the iamb as a dominant measure,
and where rests and multiple non-stressed syllables can be discounted
in scansion. His own verse illustrates its use, but there have been
almost no imitators.
Stanza
The stanza is the second largest unit of a poem. It is also referred to
as a "verse." In traditional poetry, stanzas are often identified by a
shared rhyme scheme, form, or fixed number of lines (sestet and
quatrain, for example). In modern poetry, stanzas may also be created
for visual appearance when printed.
Stanza Break
The stanza break is the blank line that separates stanzas.
Stanza Forms
The names given to describe the number of lines in a stanzaic unit,
such as: couplet (2), tercet (3), quatrain (4), quintet (5), sestet (6),
septet (7) and octave (8),Some stanzas follow a set rhyme scheme and
meter in addition to the number of lines and are given specific names to
describe them, such as, ballad meter, ottava rima, rhyme royal, terza
rima and Spenserian stanza.
Stave
A verse, stanza or a metrical portion of a poem.
Stich
A line or verse of poetry.
Stichomythia
Dialogue in alternate verse-lines.
Stornello Verses
Verses which include the repetition of certain words in changing order
and varied placement.
Strain
A passage or piece of poetry; a flow of eloquence, style or spirit in
expression.
Stream of Consciousness
See Interior Monologue
Stress
The prominence or emphasis given to particular syllables. Stressed
syllables usually stand out because they have long, rather than short,
vowels, or because they have a different pitch or are louder than other
syllables.
Stretched Sonnet
One extended to sixteen or more lines, such as George Meredith's
"Modern Love."
Strophe
The section of a Greek ode sung when the chorus turns from one side
of the orchestra to the other.
Style
The poet's individual creative process, as determined by choices
involving diction, figurative language, rhetorical devices, sounds, and
rhythmic patterns.
Sublime
The main characteristic of great poetry, Longinus held, was sublimity or
high, grand, ennobling seriousness.
Submerged Sonnet
A sonnet hidden inside a longer poetic work, such as lines 235-48 of T.
S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
Syllabic Verse
Lines whose rhythm arises by the number of its syllables. Examples
include Thomas Nashe's "Adieu, farewell earth's bliss," Robert Bridges'
"Cheddar Pinks," Marianne Moore's "Poetry" (whose stanzas consist of
lines regularly having -- in sequence -- 19, 22, 7 or 11, 5, 8, and 13
syllables), and Dylan Thomas' "Poem in October."
Syllable
A syllable is a unit of spoken language consisting of a single
uninterrupted sound. Syllables are important for a number of forms
such as the haiku.
Syllepsis
A type of zeugma in which a single word, usually a verb or adjective,
agrees grammatically with two or more other words, but semantically
with only one, thereby effecting a shift in sense with the other, as in
"colder than ice and a usurer's heart."
Syllogism
A form of reasoning in which two statements are made and a
conclusion is drawn from them. A syllogism begins with a major premise
("All tragedies end unhappily.") followed by a minor premise ("Hamlet is
a tragedy.") and a conclusion (Therefore, "Hamlet ends unhappily.").
Symbol
Something in the world of the senses, including an action, that
manifests (reveals) or signifies (is a sign for or a pointer to) a thing, or
what is abstract, otherworldly, or numinous. Samuel Johnson (1755)
termed it "A type; that which comprehends in its figure a
representation of something else." A word denotes, refers to, or labels
something in the world, but a symbol, as a thing in the world (to which
a word, of course, may point), has a concreteness not shared by
language and points to something, often what transcends ordinary
experience. Any tree, for example, arguably symbolizes tree-ness, a
Platonic form.
Any image or action termed a Jungian archetype is also symbolic in that
it manifests something in the collective unconscious of human beings.
Writers often use symbols when they believe in a transcendental reality.
A metaphor compares two or more things that are no more and no less
real than anything else in the world. For a metaphor to be symbolic,
one of its pair of elements must manifest or reveal yet something else
transcendental. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in
Understanding Poetry (3rd edn., 1960), however, say that "The symbol
may be regarded as a metaphor from which the first term has been
omitted" (556).
Symbolist Movement
Late 19th-century French writers, including Mallarmé and Valéry, whose
verse dealt with transcendental phenomena or with images and actions
whose meaning was associative rather than referential.
Symploce
The repetition of a word or expression at the beginnings plus the
repetition of a word or expression at the ends of successive phrases, i.
e, a combination of both anaphora and epistrophe.
Synaeresis
The contraction of two syllables into one, for metrical purposes, by
changing two adjacent syllables into a diphthong. Paul Fussell gives as
an example the first line of John Milton's Paradise Lost, "Of man's first
disobedience, and the fruit," in which "the ie in disobedience changes to
what is called a y-glide, and the word becomes disobed-yence" (26). Cf.
elision.
Syncopation
In the quantitive verse of classical poetry, the suppression of one
syllable in a metrical pattern, with its time value either replaced by a
pause (like a musician's "rest") or by the additional lengthening of an
adjoining long syllable.
Syncope
The elision of an unstressed syllable so as to keep to a strict accentual-
syllabic metre. This can be managed by dropping either a consonant
("ever" to "e'er") or a vowel ("the apple" to "th'apple").
Synecdoche
A figure of speech in which a part is used to designate the whole or the
whole is used to designate a part. For example, the phrase "all hands
on deck" means "all men on deck," not just their hands. The reverse
situation, in which the whole is used for a part, occurs in the sentence
"The U.S. beat Russia in the final game," where the U.S. and Russia
stand for "the U.S. team" and "the Russian team," respectively.
Synesthesia
Synesthesia combines two senses together. For example, "velvet
silence" lets one feel the sound.
Synesthetic Metaphor
A metaphor that suggests a similarity between experiences in different
senses, as "a gourmet of country music."
Synonym
A synonym is a word that has a similar definition to another word,
making them interchangeable in context. For example, a synonym of
"laugh" is "chortle."
Syntax
The ordering of words into meaningful verbal patterns such as phrases,
clauses, and sentences. Poets often manipulate syntax, changing
conventional word order, to place certain emphasis on particular words.
Emily Dickinson, for instance, writes about being surprised by a snake
in her poem "A narrow Fellow in the Grass," and includes this line: "His
notice sudden is." In addition to the alliterative hissing s-sounds here,
Dickinson also effectively manipulates the line’s syntax so that the verb
is appears unexpectedly at the end, making the snake’s hissing
presence all the more "sudden."
Synthetic Rhyme
A forced rhyme in which the spelling and sound of a word are distorted.
Syzygy
Using different types of feet (e.g., iambic and trochaic) in the same
verse.
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