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 T
Tanka
A Japanese form of five lines counting five, seven, five, seven and seven syllables, older than the haiku and roomier, with space for feeling as well as image.
Tercet
A stanza of three lines, rhymed or unrhymed. Linked tercets form the terza rima of Dante's Divine Comedy.
Terza Rima
An interlocking pattern of tercets rhyming ABA BCB CDC, so each stanza hands a rhyme forward to the next. Invented for the Divine Comedy, it pulls the reader continuously onward.
Tetrameter
A line of four metrical feet. Iambic tetrameter is the quick, songlike line of ballads and hymns.
Theme
The central concern a poem explores beneath its surface subject. A poem about packing boxes may have moving house as its subject and loss as its theme. How fully a poem realises its theme feeds into its impact and resonance, one of the five criteria Writory scores.
Tone
The poem's attitude toward its subject and reader, carried by word choice and rhythm: tender, bitter, amused, reverent, or all four in turn.
Triolet
An eight line French form in which the first line returns as the fourth and seventh, and the second as the eighth. Half the poem is repetition; the art is making each return land differently.
Trochee
A metrical foot of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one, as in garden. Trochaic rhythm falls forward and feels older than the iamb, the sound of chants and spells.
All letters
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