p. 1835). Spondee: a two-syllable foot following the rhythmic pattern, in English verse, of two stressed (//) syllables. Thus, for example, "Utah." Syllable: the smallest unit of sound in a pronounced word. Th e syllable that receives the greatest stress is called the tonic syllable. Tetrameter (Greek "four measure"): a line with four stresses. Coleridge, Christabel, line 31: "She stole along, she nothing spoke" (see vol. 2, p. 450). Trimeter (Greek "three measure"): a line with three stresses. Herbert, "Discipline," line 1: "Throw away thy rod" (see vol. 1, p. 1623). Trochee: a two-syllable foot following the pattern, in English verse, of stressed (/) followed by unstressed (u) syllable, producing a falling effect. Thus, for example, "Texas."
(vi) Verse Forms The terms related to meter and rhythm describe the shape of individual lines. Lines of verse are combined to produce larger groupings, called verse forms. These larger groupings are in the first instance stanzas (Italian "rooms"): groupings of two or more lines, though "stanza" is usually reserved for groupings of at least four lines. Stanzas are often joined by rhyme, often in sequence, where each group shares the same metrical pattern and, when rhymed, rhyme scheme. Stanzas can themselves be arranged into larger groupings. Poets often invent new verse forms, or they may work within established forms, a list of which follows.
Ballad stanza: usually a quatrain in alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter lines, rhyming abcb. See "Sir Patrick Spens" (vol. 1, p. 2902); Louise Bennett's poems (vol. 2, pp. 2469�74); Eliot, "Sweeney among the Nightingales" (vol. 2, p. 2293); Larkin, "This Be The Verse" (vol. 2,
p. 2572). Ballade: a form consisting usually of three stanzas followed by a four-line envoi (French, "send off"). Th e last line of the first stanza establishes a refrain, which is repeated, or subtly varied, as the last line of each stanza. The form was derived from French medieval poetry; English poets, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries especially, used it with varying stanza forms. Chaucer, "Complaint to His Purse" (see vol. 1, p. 318).
Blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter lines. Blank verse has no stanzas, but is broken up into uneven units (verse paragraphs) determined by sense rather than form. First devised in English by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in his translation of two books of Virgil's Aeneid (see vol. 1, p. 614), this very flexible verse type became the standard form for dramatic poetry in the seventeenth century, as in most of Shakespeare's plays. Milton and Wordsworth, among many others, also used it to create an English equivalent to classical epic.
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Couplet: in English verse two consecutive, rhyming lines usually containing the same number of stresses. Chaucer first introduced the iambic pentameter couplet into English (Canterbury Tales); the form was later used in many types of writing, including drama; imitations and translations of classical epic (thus heroic couplet); essays; and satire (see Dryden and Pope). The distich (Greek "two lines") is a couplet usually making complete sense; Aemilia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, lines 5�6: "Read it fair queen, though it defective be, / Your excellence can grace both it and me" (see vol. l,p. 1315).
Ottava rima: an eight-line stanza form, rhyming abababcc, using iambic pentameter; Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium" (see vol. 2, p. 2040). Derived from the Italian poet Boccaccio, an eight-line stanza was used by fifteenth- century English poets for inset passages (e.g., Christ's speech from the Cross in Lydgate's Testament, lines 754�897). Th e form in this rhyme scheme was used in English poetry for long narrative by, for example, Byron (Don Juan; see vol. 2, p. 669). Quatrain: a stanza of four lines, usually rhyming abcb, abab, or abba. Of many possible examples, see Crashaw, "On the Wounds of Our Crucified Lord" (see vol. 1, p. 1644). Refrain: usually a single line repeated as the last line of consecutive stanzas, sometimes with subtly different wording and ideally with subtly different meaning as the poem progresses. See, for example, Wyatt, "Blame not my lute" (vol. 1, p. 602). Rhyme royaclass="underline" a stanza form of seven iambic pentameter lines, rhyming ababbcc; first introduced by Chaucer and called "royal" because the form was used by James I of Scotland for his Kingis Ouair in the early fifteenth century. Chaucer, "Troilus's Song" (see vol. 1, p. 316). Sonnet: a form combining a variable number of units of rhymed lines to produce a fourteen-line poem, usually in rhyming iambic pentameter lines. In English there are two principal varieties: the Petrarchan sonnet, formed by an octave (an eight-line stanza, often broken into two quatrains having the same rhyme scheme, typically abba abba) and a sestet (a six-line stanza, typically cdecde or cdcdcd); and the Shakespearean sonnet, formed by three quatrains (abab cdcd efef) and a couplet (gg). Th e declaration of a sonnet can take a sharp turn, or "volta," often at the decisive formal shift from octave to sestet in the Petrarchan sonnet, or in the final couplet of a Shakespearean sonnet, introducing a trenchant counterstatement. Derived from Italian poetry, and especially from the poetry of Petrarch, the sonnet was first introduced to English poetry by Wyatt, and initially used principally for the expression of unrequited erotic love, though later poets used the form for many other purposes. See Wyatt, "Whoso list to hunt" (vol. 1,
p. 595); Sidney, Astrophil and Stella (vol. 1, p. 975); Shakespeare, Sonnets (vol. 1, p. 1060); Wordsworth, "London, 1802" (vol. 2, p. 319); McKay, "If We Must Die" (vol. 2, p. 2464); Heaney, "Clearances" (vol. 2, p. 2833). Spenserian stanza: the stanza developed by Spenser for The Faerie Queene; nine iambic lines, the first eight of which are pentameters, followed by one hexameter, rhyming ababbcbcc. See also, for example, Shelley, Adonais (vol. 2, p. 822), and Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes (vol. 2, p. 888).
Tercet: a stanza or group of three lines, used in larger forms such as terza rima, the Petrarchan sonnet, and the villanelle. Terza rima: a sequence of rhymed tercets linked by rhyme thus: aba bcb cdc,
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etc. First used extensively by Dante in The Divine Comedy, the form was adapted in English iambic pentameters by Wyatt and revived in the nineteenth century. See Wyatt, "Mine own John Poins" (vol. 1, p. 604); Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind" (vol. 2, p. 772); and Morris, "The Death of Guinevere" (vol. 2, p. 1483). For modern adaptations see Eliot, lines 78�149 (though unrhymed) of "Little Gidding" (vol. 2, pp. 2315-16) ; Heaney, "Station Island" (vol. 2, p. 2831); Walcott, Omeros (vol. 2, p. 2591).
Triplet: a tercet rhyming on the same sound. Pope inserts triplets among heroic couplets to emphasize a particular thought; see Essay on Criticism, 315-17 (vol. 1, p. 2504). Villanelle: a fixed form of usually five tercets and a quatrain employing only two rhyme sounds altogether, rhyming aba for the tercets and abaa for the quatrain, with a complex pattern of two refrains. Derived from a French fixed form. Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" (see vol. 2,
p. 2450). (v) Syntax Syntax (Greek "ordering with") designates the rides by which sentences are constructed in a given language. Discussion of meter is impossible without some reference to syntax, since the overall effect of a poem is, in part, ahvays the product of a subtle balance of meter and sentence construction. Syntax is also essential to the understanding of prose style, since prose writers, deprived of the full shaping possibilities of meter, rely all the more heavily on syntactic resources. A working command of syntactical practice requires an understanding of the parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, and interjections), since writers exploit syntactic possibilities by using particular combinations and concentrations of the parts of speech. The list below offers some useful terms for the description of syntactic features of a work.