The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Quarterly Review Tory magazine begun in 1809. Shelley held a ‘homicidal article’ in it responsible for Keats’s early demise: ‘Who killed John Keats? I, said the Quarterly, So savage and Tartarly, ’Twas one of my feats.’ Byron adapted S’s squib in Don Juan (but see under Cockney School).

quaternary Divided into four: in prosody this refers to metrical feet that have four units, such as the choriamb and the antispast.

quatorzain Name given to a fourteen-line poem that is not considered by the prosodist or critic using the term to be a ‘true’ sonnet. A subjective matter, to be honest.

quatrain A four-line stanza.

quintain A five-line stanza, or cinquain.

q.v. From Latin quod vide meaning ‘which see’ or ‘take a look at that one’, used in fancy glossaries like this to follow a word in the body of a definition which has its own entry q.v.

rann A quatrain in Irish verse.

redondilla Spanish verse cast in octosyllables.

refrain Line repeated at set intervals within a song or poem.

reify, reification To concretise the abstract, to embody an idea.

rentrementRefrain, burden or single-lined chorus.

repetend Any word or phrase that is (to be) repeated.

rhadif The refrain line of a ghazal.

rhapsody The sung part of an epic or saga. Applied to moments of lyricism in otherwise non-lyric verse, i.e. the ‘Isles of Greece’ section in Byron’s Don Juan.

rhopalic Progression of words whereby each word is longer by one syllable than its predecessor.

rhopalics Too silly to bother with.

rhyme royal, rime royal An open stanza form following the scheme ababbcc. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ are written in this form.

rhyme-scheme The pattern of rhyming in a stanza or passage of verse, abba abab, aa etc represent various examples of r. s.

rich rhyme The rhyming of words that either look and sound the same but have a different meaning (homonyms), ‘the sound is very sound’, or words that sound the same but look different, (homophones

) like blue/blew or praise/preys, >or words that look the same but sound different, ‘he wore a bow and made a bow to the audience’ etc.

rictameter See rhopalics.

rime en kyrielle Used to describe any rentrement q.v. or poetic refrain.

rime retournée Backwards rhyme, but of sound not spelling: i.e. not emit and time, Eros and sore but mite or might and time, Eros and sorry etc.

rising rhythm Metre whose primary movement is from unstressed to stressed, iambs and anapaests for example.

rondeau Closed French form with various English guises. R-aabba aabR aabbaR seems to be the most common form, where R is the first half of the opening line. ‘In Flanders Fields’ by John McCrea is a well-known example of this kind of r.

rondeau redoublé Variation of rondeau q.v. where the last lines of each stanza become refrain lines for the following stanzas. See the ‘More Closed French Forms’ section of Chapter Three.

rondel Another French rentrement form. Check it out in Chapter Three, as above.

rondel prime Ditto basically.

rondelet And again.

rondine The name of Shiraz’s sister in Footballer’s Wives. No, but shush at once.

roundel Swinburne’s name for his adaptation of one or other of the French letter-R forms.

roundelay Refrained verse of some bloody kind.

Rubai, ruba’iat, ruba’iyat At last, sense. Quatrain verse of Persian origin, rhyming aaba, ccdc

etc.

salad Summery vegetable assemblage not to be confused with ballad or ballade q.v. Often contains tomatoes q.v.

Sapphic metre In classical verse, a hendecasyllabic line composed of a trochee, an anceps, a dactyl, a trochee and a spondee.

Sapphic Ode A stanza of three lines in Sapphic metre as above, followed by an Adonic line. The English stress-based adaptation as seen in Pope and others is usually in iambic pentameter or tetrameter with an iambic dimeter instead of a true Adonic.

Satanic School Southey’s petulant name for poets like Byron, Shelley and Leigh Hunt who were better than he was and had more integrity.

scazon Substitution of a ternary foot for a binary. See choliamb.

schwa The phonetic character that stands for a scudded uh sound, as in the weak vowel sounds in words like act and commn and gramm.

scop Old English or Nordic storyteller, bard or poet.