| A | B |
|---|
| The Sirens | in Greek mythology, half-bird, half-woman sea nymphs whose seductive singing lured sailors to their deaths; the hero Odysseus (aka Ulysses) escapes them by tying himself to the mast of his ship |
| Genesis | the start of something |
| Lash | to tie up |
| Deterrent | something which hinders action |
| Inundate | to overwhelm or flood a person with |
| Lea | meadow |
| Chastise | to scold or criticize |
| Pagan | one of a people or community observing a polytheistic religion, such as the ancient Romans and Greeks |
| Creed | religion or belief |
| Syntax | sentence structure |
| Digressive | veering away from the main point |
| Polysyndeton | the use of many conjunctions where normally only one would be used: We laughed and cried and sang. |
| Paradox | a statement that seems contradictory but actually makes sense |
| Parallelism | the repetition of a syntactic construction within sentences or in successive sentences |
| Exemplification | explaining by example |
| Allusion | in literature, an implied or indirect reference to a person, event, or thing or to a part of another text; frequently drawn from mythology, literature, the Bible, or history |
| Oratorical | highly rhetorical or characteristic of a public, formal speech |
| Hectoring | bullying |
| Whimsical | lighthearted, carefree |
| Mundane | of or pertaining to this world or earth as contrasted with heaven; worldly; earthly; common; ordinary |
| Villanelle | a verse form of French origin consisting of 19 lines arranged in five tercets (three-line stanzas) and a quatrain. The first and third lines of the first tercet recur alternately at the end of each subsequent tercet and both together at the end of the quatrain |
| Heroic stanza | a quatrain (four-line stanza) having the rhyme scheme a b a b |
| Shakespearean | 14-line sonnet form having the rhyme scheme abab, cdcd, efef, gg |
| Petrarchan | 14-line sonnet form consisting of an octave (eight-line stanza) and a sestet (six-line stanza), typically abbaabba + cdecde |
| Oxymoron | a paradoxical or contradictory phrase, such as deafening silence |
| Meter | the rhythm of a poem, based on its pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables |
| Caesura | a break or pause in the line or poetry |
| Feminine | rhyme or more than one syllables (such as motion/notion) |
