Home › Glossary › Letter C

Contour

Craft Terms
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

To give a poem a discernible shape or changing profile through shifts in tone, syntax, image, or sound. Contour lets the reader feel movement across the whole work.

Detailed Definition
Poetic contour is the pattern of rises, falls, bends, and pauses that gives a poem its larger topography. A lyric may begin in clipped statements, widen into flowing sentences, and narrow again at its close; an elegy may move from ordinary objects toward abstraction and back. Attending to contour keeps each line connected to the poem’s total motion, so that local choices contribute to an intelligible emotional and formal landscape.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poet contours an image by tracing its changing edges, as a mountain appears first as a dark line and then as snow, trees, and rock; Contouring an emotion lets grief move from numbness to anger to tenderness instead of naming it once; Enjambment can contour a sentence by delaying its key word across the line break; A contoured character is revealed through gestures, habits, and contradictions rather than through a direct description.
Additional Notes
Contour describes the poem’s overall movement, like the profile of a landscape. A poem may rise toward intensity, flatten into reflection, or descend into silence through changes in syntax, line length, imagery, and sound. Studying contour helps writers avoid a monotonous middle. Related ideas include arc, pacing, progression, and structural rhythm.
Other Meanings of “Contour”
Also Known As
Outline Profile
Skip to main content