Page 8 - 100 Best Loved Poems - Teaching Unit

Setting - when and where the short story, play, or novel takes place. Examples: Macbeth takes
place in the eleventh century in Scotland. The Old Man and the Sea has its main setting on
th
the ocean outside Havana, Cuba, in an unspecified time in the middle-to-late 20 -century.

Simile - a comparison between two different things using either like or as. Examples: I am as
hungry as a horse. The huge trees broke like twigs during the hurricane.

Soliloquy - lines in a play in which a character reveals thoughts to the audience, but not to the
other characters; it is usually longer than an aside and not directed at the audience.
Example: Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” speech.

Sonnet - a fourteen line poem written in iambic pentameter and having a standard rhyme scheme.
Example: Shakespeare’s Sonnet I
From fairest creatures we desire increase, [A]
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die, [B]
But as the riper should by time decrease, [A]
His tender heir might bear his memory: [B]
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes, [C]
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel, [D]
Making a famine where abundance lies, [C]
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel. [D]
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament, [E]
And only herald to the gaudy spring, [F]
Within thy own bud buriest thy content, [E]
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding. [F]
Pity the world, or else this glutton be, [G]
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee. [G]

Stanza - a grouping of lines in a poem. Example:

It was many and many a year ago
In a kingdom by the sea
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
–Edgar Allen Poe

Synecdoche - using a part of something to stand for the entire thing. Example: I spoke to Big
Mouth yesterday.

Synesthesia – the merging or mixing of two sensory experiences to create an image: “hearing” a
“color.” Example: The perfume unleashed a stream of perfect words.

Syntax - the arrangement of words to form sentences.

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