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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
A poetic framework that mimics or repeats sounds, phrases, or patterns to evoke resonance or memory
Explore this topic in depth (5)
Rhyme
— Rhyme is more than a matching sound at the ends of lines. This guide explores how poets use rhyme to organise language, create expectation, make connections between words and alter what we hear when a poem is read or sung.
Ballad
— Ballads tell memorable stories in a compact, musical form. Rooted in oral tradition but endlessly reshaped on the printed page, they use rhythm, repetition and dramatic scenes to make narratives travel.
Stanzas in Poetry
— A stanza is more than a block of lines on a page. Learn how stanza patterns, breaks and repetitions organise a poem—and how those structures can change when the words are spoken or sung.
Ode
— An ode is not one rigid pattern but a flexible lyric genre in which a speaker gives sustained, heightened attention to a person, object, place, idea or experience. It can praise, question, remember, mourn and think aloud.
The Sestina
— A sestina is built from six end-words that return in a changing order across six stanzas and a brief closing envoi. Its pattern can look daunting on paper, but it is best understood as an audible cycle: familiar words arriving in new emotional and grammatical surroundings.
Detailed Definition
Echoic structure is a poetic technique where sounds, words, or phrases are repeated with subtle variation to mimic acoustic resonance, creating aural texture and thematic reinforcement; this may involve alliteration, assonance, or delayed repetition that functions like an echo, enhancing musicality and suggesting memory, haunting, or cyclical return within the poem’s sonic landscape.
Example
Example in poetry:
The repetition of “I have known” in T.S. Eliot’s “Preludes” creates echoic structure; the refrain “Remember” in Christina Rossetti’s poem echoes through time; modern example: opening and closing lines identical to frame memory; another: internal echoes like “water / daughter / slaughter” in Plath’s “Daddy.”
In “The Waste Land,” motifs like water and drought create echo structure; Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel” uses horse imagery as echo structure; Contemporary poet Claudia Rankine uses microaggression as echo structure in “Citizen”; Echo structure appears in Dante’s “Divine Comedy” through terza rima; In “Song of Myself,” Whitman uses “I” as echo structure.
Additional Notes
Echoic structure uses repetition, sound patterns, or mirrored phrases to create auditory resonance; it enhances musicality and can suggest psychological or thematic echoes.
The overall arrangement or architecture of a poem that relies heavily on repetition, whether of words, phrases, lines, or whole stanzas; look for patterns like refrains, parallelism, or cyclical narrative structures.