[TEA-GEA] ENG3U, Eng ...

We have covered a number of figures of speech in the unit including allusions, imagery, metaphor, simile, rhyme and rhythm and here are a few more that are less common but just as important.  The three I am going to discuss are what tends to give poetry it’s rhythmic flow and musicality. 

Alliteration. The green grass grew in the graveyard.  Note words can be separated   by conjunctions. Alliterations draw attention to themselves.

Enjambment is when the writer uses line breaks meaningfully and abruptly to either emphasize a point or to create dual meanings. 

Rolling through the field in the
dead
of winter.

 This is a feature of Free Verse that we have already seen in poems that have no particular formal rhythm and rhyme scheme.

 When a poem is read, the reader will conventionally make a slight pause (shorter than a comma) when transitioning from line to line. When a writer uses enjambment, he or she uses this space to spread an idea over more than one line, either creating an alternate interpretation of the lines or drawing attention to the enjambed words.

Onomatopoeia is the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named (e.g. bark, cuckoo, sizzle). These are made up words but there is universal agreement about their meaning. “meow” is a cat. It sounds like the noise. “MOO” is the sound a cow makes and we can make up a sentence like, “when my sister was angry she mooed like a cow”