Poetic Forms and Terms

Below are poems that contain or serve as examples of certain poetic forms and terms. For more detailed information about these and other terms, visit the Poetry Foundation’s Learning Lab.

Alliteration

The repetition of initial, stressed, consonant sounds in a series of words within a phrase or verse line. Alliteration need not reuse all initial consonants; “pizza” and “place” alliterate.

  • The Darkling Thrush
  • The Destruction of Sennacherib
  • Meeting at Night
  • Over and Under
  • She Walks in Beauty
  • The Windhover

Allusion

A brief, intentional reference to a historical, mythic, or literary person, place, event, or movement.

  • The Animals
  • Bright Star
  • Chicago
  • The Collar
  • The Death of Allegory
  • The Destruction of Sennacherib
  • Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness
  • Kindness
  • Kubla Khan
  • The Larger
  • Love Armed
  • "Love of My Flesh, Living Death"
  • The Second Coming
  • The Statesmen

Aphorism

A pithy, instructive statement or truism, like a maxim or adage.

  • Ars Poetica
  • The New Decalogue

Ars Poetica

A term meaning “the art of poetry,” an ars poetica poem expresses that poet's aims for poetry and/or that poet's theories about poetry.

  • Adam’s Curse
  • Ars Poetica

Assonance

The repetition of vowel sounds without repeating consonants; sometimes called vowel rhyme.

  • The Properly Scholarly Attitude

Aubade

A love poem or song welcoming or lamenting the arrival of the dawn.

  • Break of Day

Ballad

A popular narrative song passed down orally. In the English tradition, it usually follows a form of rhymed (ABCB) quatrains alternating four-stress and three-stress lines. Folk (or traditional) ballads are anonymous and recount tragic, comic, or heroic stories.

  • The Birth of John Henry
  • Confessions
  • In the Past
  • Incident
  • La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad
  • The Listeners
  • A Red, Red Rose
  • Sadie and Maud
  • Saturday’s Child
  • So We'll Go No More a Roving
  • Up-Hill

Blank Verse

Unrhyming iambic pentameter, also called heroic verse.

  • The Bearer
  • Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg
  • Fever
  • The Great Blue Heron
  • In a London Drawingroom
  • Mending Wall
  • The Man with the Hoe
  • O Carib Isle!
  • On Virtue
  • Part for the Whole
  • The Princess: Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal
  • The Snow-Storm
  • Traveling through the Dark
  • Writing

Common Measure

A quatrain that rhymes ABAB and alternates four-stress and three-stress iambic lines. It is the meter of the hymn and the ballad.

  • The Birth of John Henry
  • Break, Break, Break
  • The Children's Hour
  • The Darkling Thrush
  • The Donkey
  • I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, (340)
  • I heard a Fly buzz - when I died - (591)
  • It Couldn’t Be Done
  • It sifts from Leaden Sieves - (291)
  • It was not Death, for I stood up, (355)
  • “Hope” is the thing with feathers - (314)
  • Light Shining out of Darkness
  • The Listeners
  • Love Song
  • Old Ironsides
  • A Red, Red Rose
  • So We'll Go No More a Roving
  • The Tables Turned
  • To Althea, from Prison
  • To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
  • You charm'd me not with that fair face

Concrete or Pattern Poetry

Verse that emphasizes nonlinguistic elements in its meaning, such as a typeface that creates a visual image of the topic.

  • [in Just-]
  • Valentine

Confessional

Self-revelatory verse associated with a number of American poets writing in the 1950s and 1960s.

  • Blackberrying
  • The Campus on the Hill
  • Epilogue
  • Her Kind
  • A Locked House
  • My Papa’s Waltz
  • Skunk Hour

Consonance

A resemblance in sound between two words, or an initial rhyme.

  • Meeting at Night
  • She Walks in Beauty
  • Strange Meeting

Couplet

A pair of successive rhyming lines, usually of the same length.

  • “Alone”
  • American Solitude
  • The Arrow and the Song
  • Author’s Prayer
  • Barber
  • Catch a Little Rhyme
  • The Daring One
  • Do Not!
  • Epitaph
  • Experience
  • For Allen Ginsberg
  • Introduction to the Songs of Innocence
  • January, 1795
  • Lazy
  • A Locked House
  • The New Decalogue
  • November Cotton Flower
  • On Shakespeare. 1630
  • The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
  • Piano
  • Recuerdo
  • Romance
  • The Spring
  • The Star
  • Strange Meeting
  • Thoughts in a Zoo
  • To an Athlete Dying Young
  • To My Dear and Loving Husband
  • The Tree
  • The War Horse

Dramatic Monologue

A poem in which an imagined speaker addresses a silent listener, usually not the reader.

  • The Chimney Sweeper: A little black thing among the snow
  • A Farmer Remembers Lincoln
  • The Larger
  • Lucinda Matlock
  • The Maid’s Lament
  • Mrs. Kessler
  • a song in the front yard

Ekphrasis

“Description” in Greek. An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art.

  • Fishing on the Susquehanna in July
  • Nude Descending a Staircase

Elegy

In traditional English poetry, it is often a melancholy poem that laments its subject's death but ends in consolation.

  • The Bones of My Father
  • The Charge of the Light Brigade
  • The Darkling Thrush
  • Epitaph
  • The Great Blue Heron
  • In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • John Lennon
  • The Legend
  • On Shakespeare. 1630
  • To an Athlete Dying Young
  • To the Memory of Mr. Oldham

Epigram

A pithy, often witty, poem.

  • Fire and Ice

Epistle

A letter in verse, usually addressed to a person close to the writer.

  • Epistle to Mrs. Tyler
  • The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
  • To Luck

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.

  • American Smooth
  • And Soul
  • Angels
  • The animals in that country
  • Apollo
  • Ars Poetica
  • Author’s Prayer
  • Backdrop addresses cowboy
  • Banneker
  • Barber
  • Birthday Poem
  • Black Boys Play the Classics
  • The Blackstone Rangers
  • A Blessing
  • The Bloody Sire
  • The Blues Don’ t Change
  • Break of Day in the Trenches
  • Burning the Old Year
  • Camouflaging the Chimera
  • The Campus on the Hill
  • Chicago
  • Childhood’s Retreat
  • Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15)
  • Conversation
  • Courtesy
  • Danse Russe
  • Deaf-Mute in the Pear Tree
  • The Death of Allegory
  • The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee
  • Dressing My Daughters
  • Driving toward the Lac Qui Parle River
  • Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest
  • Eating Together
  • Ego
  • The Empty Dance Shoes
  • The End of Science Fiction
  • The Enigma
  • every single day
  • Evolution of My Block
  • Ex Machina
  • Fairy-tale Logic
  • Falling: The Code
  • Famous
  • Father Son and Holy Ghost
  • The Film
  • First Storm and Thereafter
  • Fishing on the Susquehanna in July
  • Flies Buzzing
  • For Love
  • Garden
  • The Gift
  • Gitanjali 35
  • Glass
  • The Goddess Who Created This Passing World
  • Good People
  • Grandfather
  • Gravelly Run
  • The Greatest Grandeur
  • Heaven
  • Helen
  • Here Is an Ear Hear
  • The Hill
  • Himself
  • Hush
  • I Am the People, the Mob
  • [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]
  • I Genitori Perduti
  • I Hear America Singing
  • I Know, I Remember, But How Can I Help You
  • I, Too
  • [if mama / could see]
  • Ikebana
  • Immigrant Picnic
  • In
  • In the Basement of the Goodwill Store
  • In California: Morning, Evening, Late January
  • In the Desert
  • [in Just-]
  • In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • Inside Out
  • It Isn’t Me
  • Kindness
  • The Lamb
  • Late Echo
  • Layabout
  • Lazy
  • Learning to swim
  • Leda
  • Like Rousseau
  • Lions
  • Listening
  • Little Father
  • The Luggage
  • Lunar Baedeker
  • Magnitudes
  • The Meaning of the Shovel
  • Mechanism
  • Meditation at Lagunitas
  • Medusa
  • Memory As a Hearing Aid
  • The Minks
  • Momma Said
  • Movement Song
  • mulberry fields
  • My Brother, the Artist, at Seven
  • The Negro Speaks of Rivers
  • The New World
  • The Night of the Shirts
  • Nocturne
  • A Noiseless Patient Spider
  • Not Guilty
  • Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
  • “oh antic God”
  • The Old Liberators
  • The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.
  • On the Existence of the Soul
  • On the Lawn at the Villa
  • Onions
  • Ovation
  • Over and Under
  • Passing
  • Past-Lives Therapy
  • The Peace of Wild Things
  • Piute Creek
  • Planetarium
  • Pleasures
  • Poem
  • Poem with One Fact
  • The Poet
  • The Poet at Seventeen
  • Possible Answers to Prayer
  • Prayer Rug
  • Prisoners
  • Psalm
  • Queen-Anne’s Lace
  • Queens Cemetery, Setting Sun
  • Reflections on History in Missouri
  • Remarks on Poetry and the Physical World
  • Retired Ballerinas, Central Park West
  • Riprap
  • The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
  • The River of Bees
  • Saguaro
  • Saint Francis and the Sow
  • Sanctuary
  • Seen Through a Window
  • Self-Inquiry Before the Job Interview
  • Self-Portrait
  • Semblance: Screens
  • September, 1918
  • Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt
  • Snowy Owl Near Ocean Shores
  • So This Is Nebraska
  • Somewhere
  • Somewhere to Paris
  • Stanzas in Meditation: Stanza LXXXIII
  • The Strength of Fields
  • Surfaces
  • Susie Asado
  • Testimonial
  • They are hostile nations
  • Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
  • Through a Glass Eye, Lightly
  • (to crave what the light does crave)
  • To Elsie
  • To Live with a Landscape
  • Torque
  • The Treasure
  • The True-Blue American
  • The Truly Great
  • Truth Serum
  • Two Guitars
  • Ultima Thule
  • Virtuosi
  • Waking from Sleep
  • The Way It Sometimes Is
  • The Well Rising
  • The Widow’s Lament in Springtime
  • Zacuanpapalotls

Ghazal

(Pronounciation: “guzzle”) Originally an Arabic verse form dealing with loss and romantic love. Consisting of syntactically and grammatically complete couplets, the form also has an intricate rhyme scheme.

  • Ghazal

Imagery

These poems are largely concerned with the use of strong and evocative images to create a highly visual, imaginative reading experience.

  • The Alphabet
  • Anecdote of the Jar
  • As Children Know
  • The Bearer
  • A Birthday
  • Bright Star
  • The Canonization
  • Chicago
  • The Chimney Sweeper: A little black thing among the snow
  • The Collar
  • Confessions
  • The Death of Allegory
  • The Destruction of Sennacherib
  • The Enigma
  • Four Glimpses of Night
  • The Great Blue Heron
  • Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness
  • I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, (340)
  • It was not Death, for I stood up, (355)
  • It would be neat if with the New Year
  • Kubla Khan
  • Light Shining out of Darkness
  • Meeting at Night
  • O Carib Isle!
  • Old Men Playing Basketball
  • Onions
  • Over and Under
  • Somewhere to Paris
  • The Sun Rising
  • Ultima Thule
  • Valentine

Imagist

An early 20th-century poetic movement that relied on the resonance of concrete images drawn in precise, colloquial language rather than traditional poetic diction and meter.

  • Garden
  • Helen
  • Leda

Metaphor

A comparison that is made without pointing out a similarity by using words such as “like,” “as,” or “than.”

  • Anecdote of the Jar
  • Caged Bird
  • The Canonization
  • Chicago
  • The City of Sleep
  • The Collar
  • Dover Beach
  • The Enigma
  • The Great Blue Heron
  • Holy Sonnets: Batter my heart, three-person'd God
  • Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness
  • I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, (340)
  • I'm a Fool to Love You
  • It would be neat if with the New Year
  • Kindness
  • The Larger
  • “Hope” is the thing with feathers - (314)
  • Love (III)
  • Meditation at Lagunitas
  • The Metal and the Flower
  • O Carib Isle!
  • The Pulley
  • Reverie in Open Air
  • The Rose
  • Self-Inquiry Before the Job Interview
  • The Snow-Storm
  • The Sun Rising
  • Two Guitars
  • A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

Mixed

  • After Apple-Picking
  • Kubla Khan
  • Old Men Playing Basketball
  • Preludes
  • The Second Coming

Ode

A formal, often ceremonious lyric poem that addresses and often celebrates a person, place, thing, or idea. Its stanza forms vary.

  • Ode for the American Dead in Asia
  • Ode on Solitude
  • To Autumn
  • To Fashion
  • To Solitude
  • You, Andrew Marvell

Pastoral

Poets writing in English drew on the pastoral tradition by retreating from the trappings of modernity to the imagined virtues and romance of rural life. Its themes persist in poems that romanticize rural life or reappraise the natural world.

  • Fern Hill
  • I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
  • The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd
  • The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
  • Reverie in Open Air
  • The Spring

Persona

A dramatic character, distinguished from the poet, who is the speaker of a poem.

  • Anne Rutledge
  • Eros Turannos
  • The Larger
  • Lucinda Matlock
  • Luke Havergal
  • Miniver Cheevy
  • Mrs. Kessler
  • Richard Cory
  • a song in the front yard

Prose Poem

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.

  • Flood: Years of Solitude
  • A Supermarket in California

Quatrain

  • Dawn Chorus
  • Gulf Memo
  • The Way It Sometimes Is

Refrain

A phrase or line repeated at intervals within a poem, especially at the end of a stanza.

  • The City of Sleep
  • A Hymn to God the Father
  • On Inhabiting an Orange
  • The Powwow at the End of the World
  • The Properly Scholarly Attitude
  • Requests for Toy Piano
  • Sad Boy's Sad Boy
  • The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls
  • The Watchers
  • The Watchers

Rhymed Stanza

The repetition of syllables, typically at the end of a verse line.

  • Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight
  • Actaeon
  • Advice to a Prophet
  • The Affliction of Richard
  • Ah! Why, Because the Dazzling Sun
  • The Alphabet
  • The American Soldier
  • Amor Mundi
  • The Animals
  • At Cross Purposes
  • At Melville’s Tomb
  • A Barred Owl
  • Barter
  • Battle-Hymn of the Republic
  • The Birth of John Henry
  • A Birthday
  • A Black Man Talks of Reaping
  • "Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind"
  • A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky
  • Break, Break, Break
  • The Brook
  • Buckroe, After the Season, 1942
  • The Canonization
  • Channel Firing
  • The Charge of the Light Brigade
  • The Children's Hour
  • Chorus Sacerdotum
  • The City of Sleep
  • Coda
  • Cold Blooded Creatures
  • The Collar
  • Concord Hymn
  • The Convergence of the Twain
  • A Country Boy in Winter
  • A Country Incident
  • Crossing the Bar
  • The Darkling Thrush
  • Dawn Chorus
  • The Destruction of Sennacherib
  • Dirge in Woods
  • Disenchantment Bay
  • Early Affection
  • End of Summer
  • Epilogue
  • Epitaph on the Lady Mary Villiers
  • Eros Turannos
  • The Fair Singer
  • Father
  • Fern Hill
  • A Fit of Rhyme against Rhyme
  • Floating Island
  • Follow Thy Fair Sun
  • For Allen Ginsberg
  • For My Contemporaries
  • Fortuna
  • The Good-Morrow
  • Gulf Memo
  • Hap
  • Her Kind
  • Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness
  • I Knew a Woman
  • Immortal Sails
  • In a Dark Time
  • In the Past
  • In School-days
  • Insomnia
  • Invictus
  • Is My Team Ploughing
  • Israfel
  • It Couldn’t Be Done
  • Janet Waking
  • January, 1795
  • Kubla Khan
  • Larkinesque
  • Let It Be Forgotten
  • Let the Light Enter
  • Life in a Love
  • Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing
  • The Listeners
  • A Locked House
  • London
  • Looking into History
  • Love Armed
  • Love (III)
  • Lovers' Infiniteness
  • Luke Havergal
  • The Maldive Shark
  • Medusa
  • Meeting at Night
  • The Man He Killed
  • Miniver Cheevy
  • Much Madness is divinest Sense - (620)
  • My Papa’s Waltz
  • News
  • No Coward Soul Is Mine
  • Nude Descending a Staircase
  • On Inhabiting an Orange
  • On Monsieur’s Departure
  • Over the Roofs
  • The Owl
  • Piano
  • The Pilgrim
  • Pity the Beautiful
  • The Properly Scholarly Attitude
  • The Pulley
  • Recuerdo
  • Revenge
  • Richard Cory
  • The Road Not Taken
  • Safe in their Alabaster Chambers (124)
  • Say not the Struggle nought Availeth
  • Shall earth no more inspire thee
  • She Walks in Beauty
  • Shiloh: A Requiem (April, 1862)
  • Sign
  • Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight
  • Skunk Hour
  • Solitude
  • Song
  • Song After Campion
  • Song for the Last Act
  • Song: Go and catch a falling star
  • Song in a Minor Key
  • Song of the Powers
  • The Song of the Smoke
  • The Speakers
  • Spring and Fall
  • Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
  • The Sun Rising
  • The Tables Turned
  • They Flee From Me
  • Thou Art My Lute
  • Thoughtless Cruelty
  • The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls
  • The Time I’ve Lost in Wooing
  • To a Mouse
  • To Autumn
  • To the Western World
  • Translations from the English
  • The Tyger
  • The Vacuum
  • A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
  • Valentine
  • The War in the Air
  • The Watchers
  • The Watchers
  • What It Does
  • Women
  • You, Andrew Marvell

Simile

A comparison (see Metaphor) made with “as,” “like,” or “than.”

  • As Children Know
  • A Birthday
  • Chicago
  • The Destruction of Sennacherib
  • Dover Beach
  • Holy Sonnets: Batter my heart, three-person'd God
  • I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, (340)
  • The Statesmen

Sonnet

A 14-line poem with a variable rhyme scheme. Literally a “little song,” the sonnet traditionally reflects upon a single sentiment, with a clarification or “turn” of thought in its concluding lines.

  • America
  • Bereavement
  • Childhood
  • Dreamers
  • Epitaph on the Tombstoneof a Child, the Last of Seven that Died Before
  • Fairy-tale Logic
  • Grief
  • TheIlliterate
  • Life
  • Nineteen-Fourteen: The Soldier
  • November Cotton Flower
  • On An Unsociable Family
  • The Princess: Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal
  • Silence
  • Snowflake
  • Sonnet 1
  • Sonnets from the Portuguese 43: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
  • Spring
  • Time Does Not Bring Relief: You All Have Lied
  • When I Consider How My Light Is Spent
  • When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be
  • The World Is Too Much With Us

Syllabic

Poetry whose meter is determined by the total number of syllables per line, rather than the number of stresses.

  • American Solitude
  • Analysis of Baseball
  • Discrimination

Tercet

  • Mechanism

Villanelle

A French verse form consisting of five three-line stanzas and a final quatrain, with the first and third lines of the first stanza repeating alternately in the following stanzas.

  • Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
  • One Art
  • Sad Boy's Sad Boy
  • Sugar Dada
  • Video Blues
  • The Waking