Poet's Glossary
Every craft has its vocabulary, and poetry's is one of the most beautiful. This glossary explains the forms, meters, rhymes and devices poets reach for, in plain and warm language. Whether you are decoding a sonnet or naming a technique you already use by instinct, start with a letter below.
Terms starting with R
Refrain
A line or phrase repeated at intervals through a poem, usually at the ends of stanzas. Each return arrives slightly changed by everything since.
Renga
A Japanese collaborative form in which poets alternate linked stanzas. Its opening verse eventually broke free and became the haiku.
Repetition
The deliberate reuse of words, sounds or structures for emphasis and music. In poetry nothing repeats innocently; every return means more.
Rhyme
The correspondence of sounds between words, usually at line endings. Rhyme binds lines together, aids memory and gives a poem its bell notes.
Rhyme Scheme
The pattern of end rhymes in a poem, written as letters, so a Shakespearean sonnet runs ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.
Rhythm
The overall movement of stressed and unstressed syllables through a poem, whether governed by strict meter or by the freer cadence of speech.
Rondeau
A French form of fifteen lines on two rhymes, whose opening words return twice as a refrain, most famously in the war poem In Flanders Fields.
All letters
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