Adoneus or Adonic Line: The last
line of a "Sapphic stanza." According to the German
Wictionary, the Adoneus is: "ein
aus der Antike stammender Versfuß aus fünf Gliedern mit der Form
-UU-U. In the Poets Collective website it is called
the Adonic line and is "composed in 5
syllables, a dactyl followed by a
trochee.
Agogic Accent: An accent caused by relative
prolongation of the word to be emphasized. Common in French
poetry.
Allegory: 1. A representation of an abstract or
spiritual meaning through concrete or material forms; figurative
treatment of one subject under the guise of another. 2. A
symbolical narrative: the allegory of "Piers
Plowman" or "The Pilgrim's Progress."
Alliteration: The repetition of the sound of an
initial consonant or consonant cluster in stressed syllables
close enough to each other for the ear to be affected. The term
is also used for the repetition of an initial consonant in
unstressed syllables.
Anadiplosis, plural anadiploses:
Rhetorical repetition at the beginning of a phrase of the word or
words with which the previous phrase ended; for example, "He
is a man of loyalty-loyalty always firm." "Erhabener
Geist, du gabst mir alles, alles worum ich bat."
--Goethe
Anapest: A metrical foot of two short syllables
followed by one long.
Anaphora: The deliberate repetition of a word
or phrase at the beginning of several successive verses, clauses,
or paragraphs; for example, "We shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the
fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills"
Winston S. Churchill)
Apocope: The loss of one or more sounds from
the end of a word including the elision of the final vowel.
Apostrophe: The direct address of an absent or
imaginary person or of a personified abstraction, especially as a
digression in the course of a speech.
Apposition: An explanatory noun or phrase
normally placed after the noun explicated. In German it must be
in the same case and set off with commas.
Assonance: Resemblance of sound, especially of
the vowel sounds in words, as in: "that dolphin-torn, that
gong-tormented sea" (William Butler Yeats). 2. The
repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds, especially in
stressed syllables, with changes in the intervening consonants,
as in the phrase tilting at windmills.
Asyndeton: The omission of conjunctions from
constructions in which they would normally be used, as in
"Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils,/Shrunk to
this little measure?" (Shakespeare).
Bindestrich: The German word for a hyphen, normally used to connect words and shorter
than a dash.
Binnenreim: Reim innerhalb der Verszeile.
Caesura: A pause in a line of verse dictated by sense or natural speech rhythm rather than metrics.
Chiasmus: Any structure in which elements are
repeated in reverse, so giving the pattern ABBA. Comes from the
greek letter for "X" which is "chi." "A
form of perfection to perfection form."
Climax: A series of statements or ideas in an ascending order of rhetorical force or intensity.
Consonance: The corolary to
assonance but for consonants.
Couplet: Two contiguous lines of verse which function as a metrical
unit and are so marked (usually) either by rhyme or by syntax or both.
Dactyl: A metrical foot consisting of one long
syllable followed by two short ones.
Der 1 Konjunktive als Ausdruck eines Begehrens im
Hauptsatz: Dieser Konjunktiv tritt vor allem in der 3.
Person auf: "Der Herr segne dich und behüte dich! Er lebe
hoch!
Diacope: Repetition with only a word or two
between; "Villian, damned smiling villain."
Ellipsis: 1.a.
The omission of a word or phrase necessary for a complete
syntactical construction, but not necessary for understanding.
1b. An example of such omission. 2. A series of marks:
(. . .) for example, used in writing or printing to
indicate an omission, especially of letters or words.
Enallage: The use of one grammatical form in
some way incorrectly in place of another, as the plural for the
singular in the editorial use of "we." The basic
meaning is an exchange, which can also include using an adjective
with the wrong noun as in "enttäuscht wie ein Postamt am
Sonntag," where the visitors and not the post office are
"disappointed." It can also be an
enallage of mood where the passive is used for the
active.
Enjambment: The overflow into the following
poetic line of a syntactic phrase (with its intonational contour)
begun in the preceding line without a major juncture or
pause.
Epanalepsis: A repetition of a word or phrase
with intervening words setting off the repetition, sometimes
occurring with a phrase used both at the beginning and end of a
sentence. "Only the poor really know what it is to suffer,
only the poor."
Epanodos: The repetition of a group of words in
reverse order.
Epanorthosis, pl. -ses: The
rephrasing of an immediately preceding word or statement for the
purpose of intensification, emphasis or justification.
Extended adjectivial construction: In German called erweiterte Partizipialattribute which is mainly
used in written German is the placement of several modifiers before the present or past participial form used as an
adjective which then modifies the noun: "Der gestern um 9 Uhr in der Stadt Darmstadt stattgefundene Unfall. . ." Rarely
used by Rilke.
Epenthesis: The insertion of a sound in the
middle of a word, as in Middle English "thunder" from
Old English "thunor."
Epizeuxis: Repitition with no words
intervening.
Gedankenlyrik: Philosophical or contemplative poetry.
Gedankenstrich: A long horizontal bar which is
longer than a hyphen and is used to separate a
strong or parenthetical interruption from the rest of the
sentence. In English this is called a dash.
Historical Present: In linguistics and
rhetoric, the historical present or historic present (also called
dramatic present or narrative present) is the employment of the
present tense when narrating past events. More recently, analysts
of its use in conversation have argued that it functions not by
making an event present, but by marking segments of a narrative,
foregrounding events (that is, signalling that one event is
particularly important, relative to others) and marking a shift
to evaluation (Brinton 1992: 221).
Homonym: Two or more words that have the same
sound and often the same spelling but differ in meaning.
Hyperbaton: A figure of speech, such as
anastrophe or hysteron proteron,
using deviation from normal or logical word order to produce an
effect.
Hyperbole: A bold exaggeration.
Iambic: In Latin poetry, an iamb was a metrical
unit, a foot, consisting of a short syllable followed by a long.
In modern verse iambic is overwhelmingly the most commen meter in
prosodies such as German, Russian and English which are based on
word-stress rather than phrase-stress.
Identical Rhyme: In a perfect rhyme the
preceding consonants (or vowel and consonant) must be different
with the sounds thereafter identical, but an identical
rhyme has the same preceding consonant or vowel.
Imperfekt: The German tense which corresponds
in form to the English past tense, but in usage can be translated
by both past and present perfect.
Inclusio: A repeated phrase or word which
surrounds the main text.
Konjunktiv I: One form of the German
subjunctive built on the infinitive, dropping the "en"
or "n" and adding the subjunctive endings: for
"gehen": "ich gehe; du geh(e)st; er, es, sie gehe;
wir gehen; ihr geh(e)t; sie gehen." As you see, some of the
endings are the same as the indicative; when so, the
Konjunktiv II form is used. Konjunktiv
I is used mainly for indirekte Rede and for
third person commands: "Es werde Licht," "Let
there be light."
Metaphor: A figure of speech in which a word or
phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate
another, thus making an implicit comparison.
Metonymy: The substitution of the name of an
attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant, for example
suit for business executive.
Montage: A film technique for putting together a series of short often unrelated images that create a
composite picture or a strong emotion in the viewer.
Nominalisierung: The creation of an abstract
noun from any part of speech. In German, all that is needed is to
capitalize the word, be it verb, adverb, pronoun, past or present
participle or conjunjction, and add the requisite case endings,
if any. All such constructions are in the neuter gender.
Parallelism: The repetition of identical or
similar syntactic patterns in adjacent phrases, clauses or
sentences; the matching patterns are usually doubled, but more
extensive iteration is not rare.
Paronomasia: Two words with similar sounds but
different meanings used to create an effect, normally a
"pun."
Petrachan Sonnet: A sonnet form with the octave
form being abbaabba and the sestet with varied patterns including
cdecde or cdcdcd or similar combinations which avoid the closing
couplet as in the Shakespearean Sonnet.
Personification: As a manner of speech endowing
nonhuman objects, abstractions, or creatures with life and human
characteristics.
Pleonastic: A superfluous word, phrase or
letter.
Polyptoton: The repetition of the same word or
root in different grammatical functions or forms: "Few men
speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of
skepticism." "He cures most in whom most have
faith."
Quatrain: A stanza of 4 lines, normally
rhymed.
Rhetorical question: A question to which
no answer is expected.
Rhyme: Correspondence of sound between words or
the endings of words, especially when these are used at the ends
of lines of poetry.
Scesis onamaton: Omission of the only verb of a
sentence. Not to be confused with a zeugma where
one verb controls two parallel clauses.
Sestet: Two tercets which make up
the final part of a classical Sonnet. The normal
rhyme scheme is cde cde, but other variations are common,
especially in Rilke's Sonette an Orpheus.
Simile: A figure of speech in which two
essentially unlike things are compared, often in a phrase
introduced by like or as, as in
"How like the winter hath my abscence been" or "So
are you to my thoughts as food to life" (Shakespeare).
Gottfried Benn considered Rilke to be one of the best "Wie
Dichter."
Sperrdruck: Spaced type formerly used for
Italics and found in the Duineser Elegien and the
Sonette an Orpheus. In modern editions replaced
with italics.
Spondee: A foot of two stressed syllables.
Subjektsatz: Ein Subjekt in Gestalt eines
abhängigen Satzes, d.h. eines Gliedsatzes: "Wer nicht hören
will, muß fühlen.".
Substantivierung des Adjetives: The creation of
a noun by capitalizing an adjective and placing it into the
neuter case.
Synaesthesia: A sensation produced in one
modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, as when
the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a
certain color.
Synaloepha: Omission of a vowel to contract two
words into one such as "don't,"
"it's."
Syncope: The shortening of a word by omission
of a sound, letter, or syllable from the middle of the word for
example, bos'n for boatswain.
Tercet: A verse of 3 lines.
Trochee: A metrical foot consisting of one
stressed syllable followed by one short or unstressed
syllable.
Wunsch- und Begehrungssatz: A use of
Konjunktiv I to express a wish or desire, normally
in third person as commands. They are found mainly in Biblical or
poetic expressions such as "Der Herr segne und behüte
dich!," "Es lebe die Freiheit," "Es komme die
bessere Zeit," etc. This form exists both in main sentences
and in subordinate clauses after verbs of wishing, hoping,
demanding, desiring, etc. According to Duden: "Unter dem
Geschehen und Sein nennen, das [noch] nicht verwirklicht ist,
dessen Verwirklichung jedoch gewünscht, gewollt, gefordert,
erstrebt wird. Dabei ist zu unterscheiden zwischen Hauptsätzen
und abhändigen Sätzen."
