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Metaphor

A comparison between two seemingly unrelated things, such as the following example from Langston Hughes’ "Dreams":

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "Metaphor"

• "Leap, plashless": Emily Dickinson & Poetic Imagination
• "Shooting An Elephant": George Orwell's Essay on his Life in Burma
• Introducing Metaphors Through Poetry
• More than a Metaphor: Allegory and the Art of Persuasion
• Pictures in Words: Poems of Tennyson and Noyes
• Shakespeare's Macbeth: Fear and the "Dagger of the Mind"

Medieval

A period of time between the 5th century to the 16th century AD; also known as the Middle Ages.

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "Medieval"

• Exploring Arthurian Legend
• Symmetry in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• The Beauty of Anglo-Saxon Poetry: A Prelude to Beowulf

Meter

A series stressed and unstressed syllables arranged in patterns called feet. Iambic pentameter, for example, is a line with five feet, each of which has one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable, as with this line from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130:
    My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

The primary types of feet are:

Iambic - unstressed, stressed
Trochaic - stressed, unstressed
Anapestic - unstressed, unstressed, stressed
Dactylic - stressed, unstressed, unstressed

Metrical lines (the number of feet in a line) are named as follows:

One foot: Monometer
Two feet: Dimeter
Three feet: Trimeter
Four feet: Tetrameter
Five feet: Pentameter
Six feet: Hexameter
Seven feet: Heptameter
Eight feet: Octameter

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "Meter"

• Analyzing Poetic Devices: Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" and Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz"
• Edward Lear, Limericks, and Nonsense: A Little Nonsense
• Edward Lear, Limericks, and Nonsense: There Once Was…
• Robert Frost's "Mending Wall": A Marriage of Poetic Form and Content

Modernism

A cultural and artistic movement after World War I characterized by disillusionment with the past and a rampant desire to, in the words of Ezra Pound, "make it new."

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "Modernism"

• Analyzing Poetic Devices: Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" and Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz"
• Introduction to Modernist Poetry
• Seeing Sense in Photographs & Poems

Mythology

A collection of traditional narratives that are passed down through various textual and visual sources and that convey commonly held beliefs in a particular society about natural phenomena, historical events, and proper behavior.

EDSITEment Lesson Plans that use "Mythology"

• It Came From Greek Mythology
• Unicorns, Dragons, and Other Magical Creatures