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Unit 3: Major Literary Terms-III

along with drama, epic poetry, dancing, painting and other forms of mimesis. The lyric poem, dating Notes
from the Romantic era, does have some thematic antecedents in ancient Greek and Roman verse,
but the ancient definition was based on metrical criteria, and in archaic and classical Greek culture
presupposed live performance accompanied by a stringed instrument.

3.4.1 Forms of Lyrics

Although arguably the most popular form of lyric poetry in the Western tradition is the 14-line
sonnet, either in its Petrarchan or its Shakespearean form, lyric poetry appears in a variety of forms.
Other forms of the lyric include ballades, villanelles, odes, pastourelle and canzone.
Ancient Hebrew poetry relied on repetition, alliteration, and chiasmus for many of its effects. Ancient
Greek and Roman lyric poetry was composed in strophes. Pindar’s epinician odes, where strophe
and antistrophe are followed by an epode, represent an expansion of the same basic principle. The
Greeks distinguished, however, between lyric monody (e.g. Sappho, Anacreon) and choral lyric
(e.g. Pindar, Bacchylides). In all such poetry the fundamental formal feature is the repetition of a
metrical pattern larger than a verse or distich. In some cases (although not in antiquity), form and
theme are wed in the conception of a genre, as in the medieval alva or aubade, a dawn song in
which lovers must part after a night of love, often with the watchman’s refrain telling them it is time
to go. A common feature of some lyric forms is the refrain of one or more verses that end each
strophe. The refrain is repeated throughout the poem, either exactly or with variation. In the medieval
Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo, thought to reflect an old oral tradition, 90% of the texts
have a refrain.

What do you mean by the term lyric? List the common meters.

Much lyric poetry depends on regular meter based either on number of syllables or on stress. The
most common meters are as follows:
• Iambic—Two syllables, with the short or unstressed syllable followed by the long or stressed
syllable.
• Trochaic—Two syllables, with the long or stressed syllable followed by the short or unstressed
syllable. In English, this metre is found almost entirely in lyric poetry.
• Pyrrhic—Two unstressed syllables
• Anapestic—Three syllables, with the first two short or unstressed and the last long or stressed.
• Dactylic—Three syllables, with the first one long or stressed and the other two short or un-
stressed.
• Spondaic—Two syllables, with two successive long or stressed syllables.
Some forms have a combination of meters, often using a different meter for the refrain.

3.5 Simile

A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two different things, usually by employing the
words “like”, “as”, or “than”. Even though both similes and metaphors are forms of comparison,
similes indirectly compare the two ideas and allow them to remain distinct in spite of their similarities,
whereas metaphors compare two things directly. For instance, a simile that compares a person with a

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