My mother read nursery rhymes to me. When I went to elementary school, each new section of our English books started with a poem. I learned to love Robert Louis Stevenson, A.A. Milne, Lewis Carroll and ee cummings. As I grew older, I moved on to Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson and Maya Angelou. I had amazing teachers who taught me how to write poems (maybe not how to make them great poems).

When my sons were babies, I read them nursery rhymes and played pat-a cake. When they got a bit older, we discovered Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky together. They also had amazing teachers who taught the how to write poems. All my sons are interested in music and lyrics are now their poetry. So, in honor of the dedicated teachers who taught me the difference between a sonnet and acrostic this month’s quiz is about poetry. See if you remember these poetry terms and where you learned them.

The quiz answers are on the last page of this issue, Next Month in This Awful Awesome Life (September 2018).

Match the poetry term to its definition and example:

Terms:

Acrostic                   Couplet                      Limerick                  Ode   

Allegory                  Epic                            Lyric poem              Quatrain

Epitaph                    Narrative Poem      Haiku                        Pastoral

Blank Verse            Free Verse                Terza rima               Sonnet

Ballad                      Shakespearean sonnet                              

Conceit                    Petrarchan sonnet

Definitions:

________________a lyric poem in the form of an address in varied or irregular meter about a specific subject.

________________a poem with a hidden meaning which is usually a moral or has political significance.

________________a poem or song told in short stanzas.

________________poetry written in regular metrical unrhymed lines. It is almost always in iambic pentameter.

________________an elaborate metaphor

________________two lines of rhyming verse which form a single unit or are part of a poem

________________a poem read vertically. The first letter of each line spells out a word, name, or phrase.

________________a long narrative poem in grandiose language celebrating the adventures/accomplishments of a legendary or conventional hero.

________________a phrase or statement written in memory of someone who has died.

________________This ancient Asian form of poem writing consists of precise punctuation and syllables (5-7-5) with only three lines.

________________A poem without rules. Rhyme scheme, syllable count, punctuation, number of lines or stanzas, or line formation is up to the author.

________________a five-line witty poem with an A-A-B-B-A rhythm scheme.

________________formal poetry expressing personal emotions, often put to music.

________________A poem that tells the story of an event.

________________poem arranged in rhyming triplets, usually in iambs, with the rhyme scheme aba bcb cdc…

________________a stanza or complete poem of four lines with alternate rhymes

________________a poem reflecting an idealized version of country life.

________________a poetic form about ideal love 14 lines long written in iambic pentameter with a flexible rhyme scheme.

________________a poetic form of 14 lines with the first 12 lines divided into three quatrains with four lines each which identify a problem followed by the final two lines, the couplet, which resolves the problem.

________________a short rhyming poem with 14 lines. 

Examples:

________________“Cats”  By Kathryn Pond             

                              Creeping                          

                                Actually sleeping          

                                Teetering on a stool

                                Sneaking

________________“Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty I’m free at                                    last.” Tombstone of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 

________________“The Faerie Queen” by Edmund Spenser

 ________________“The Flea” by John Donne              

 ________________“The Mending Wall” by Robert Frost 

________________“The Walrus and the Carpenter” by Lewis Carroll

 ________________“Fog” by Carl Sandburg (Free Verse)

________________“The Odyssey” by Homer (Epic)

________________“The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus

________________Divine Comedy by Dante (Terza rima)

________________“Good nature and good sense must ever join;

                                To err is human, to forgive, divine.”

                                (from “An Essay on Criticism” by Alexander Pope) 

________________“When I have Fears that I May Cease to Be” by John Keats

________________

“Nightfall,

Too dark to read the page

Too cold” (By Jack Kerouac) 

________________“Astrophel and Stella” by Sir Philip Sidney

________________“There was a Young Lady of Dorking” by Edward Lear

________________“Ode to Sadness” by Pablo Neruda

________________“I Felt a Funeral in my Brain” by Emily Dickinson

________________“The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

________________“The Passionate Shepherd to his Love” by Christopher                                             Marlowe

________________

“It is an ancient Mariner,

And he stopped one of three.

By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?”

(From “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Coleridge)