Terminology
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Terminology
Music can be listened to in various ways. Everyone experiences music differently. Students may be moved by the lyrics of a song, may focus on the rhythm, may be drawn in by the instrumentation, or any combination of these elements. Different genres of music will cause diverse feelings and interpretation among listeners. Allow students to feel and hear the music in their own unique way and encourage them to express themselves through movement.
Terminology
| Allegory | An extended metaphor in which the characters, places, and objects in a narrative carry figurative meaning. |
| Alliteration | The repetition of initial stressed, consonant sounds in a series of words within a phrase or verse line. |
| Ballad | A narrative set to music, commonly composed in couplets with refrains in alternate lines, or quatrains of alternating rhymes. |
| Epic | A long narrative poem in which a heroic protagonist engages in an action of great mythic or historical significance. |
| Free verse | Nonmetrical, nonrhyming lines that closely follow the natural rhythms of speech. A regular pattern of sound or rhythm may emerge in free-verse lines, but the poet does not adhere to a metrical plan in their composition. |
| Haiku (or hokku) | A Japanese verse form of three unrhyming lines in five, seven, and five syllables. It creates a single, memorable image |
| Hyperbole | A figure of speech composed of a striking exaggeration |
| Irony | . As a literary device, irony implies a distance between what is said and what is meant. Based on the context, the reader is able to see the implied meaning in spite of the contradiction. |
| Lament | Any poem expressing deep grief, usually at the death of a loved one, or some other loss. |
| Limerick | A fixed light-verse form of five generally anapestic lines rhyming AABBA. Edward Lear, who popularized the form, fused the third and fourth lines into a single line with internal rhyme. |
| Lyric | Originally a composition meant for musical accompaniment. The term refers to a short poem in which the poet, the poet’s persona, or another speaker expresses personal feelings. |
| Metaphor | A comparison that is made directly (for example, John Keats’s “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” from “Ode on a Grecian Urn”) or less directly (for example, Shakespeare’s “marriage of two minds”), but in any case without pointing out a similarity by using words such as “like,” “as,” or “than.” |
| Meter ode | The rhythmical pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse. |
| Onomatopoeia | A formal, often ceremonious lyric poem that addresses and often celebrates a person, place, thing, or idea. Its stanza forms vary. |
| Paradox | A figure of speech in which the sound of a word imitates its sense |
| Prose poem | As a figure of speech, it is a seemingly self-contradictory phrase or concept that illuminates a truth. |
| Pun | A prose composition that, while not broken into verse lines, demonstrates other traits such as symbols, metaphors, and other figures of speech common to poetry. |
| Refrain | Wordplay that uses homonyms (two different words that are spelled identically) to deliver two or more meanings at the same time. |
| Rhyme | A phrase or line repeated at intervals within a poem, especially at the end of a stanza. The repetition of syllables, typically at the end of a verse line. Rhymed words conventionally share all sounds following the word’s last stressed syllable. |
| Rhythm | An audible pattern in verse established by the intervals between stressed syllables. |
| Simile | A comparison (see Metaphor) made with “as,” “like,” or “than.” |
| Stanza | A grouping of lines separated from others in a poem. |
| Syllable | A single unit of speech sound as written or spoken; specifically, a vowel preceded by zero to three consonants (“awl,” “bring,” “strand”), and followed by zero to four consonants (“too,” “brag,” “gloss,” “stings,” “sixths”). |
| Symbol | Something in the world of the senses, including an action, that reveals or is a sign for something else, often abstract or otherworldly. |
| Verse | As a mass noun, poetry in general; as a regular noun, a line of poetry. Typically used to refer to poetry that possesses more formal qualities. |