Prosody: Sound, Rhythm, and Rhyme in Poetry

True-False

Write T if the statement is true or F if it is false.

__t___ 1. The study of prosody aims to determine how poets control their words so that the sound of a poem complements its expression of emotions and ideas.

__ t__ 2. Vowel sounds create the flow of poetic speech.

__f___ 3. Very few English vowel sounds are pronounced as a schwa.

__f___ 4. There are thirty English diphthongs.

_t____ 5. In combination, vowels and consonants produce understandable speech.

__f___ 6. Stop sounds are smooth and flowing.

__t___ 7. Consonants may be either voiced or voiceless.

__t___ 8. Nasal consonants result from the release of sound through the nose.

__f___ 9. All English sounds are spelled as they are pronounced.

__f__ 10. In ordinary speech, rhythm is as important as the flow of ideas.

__f__ 11. Light stresses determine the accent or beat of a poetic line.

_f___ 12. Pentameter has four feet in a line, and tetrameter has five feet.

_f___ 13. The most important and most common poetic foot in English is the anapest.

_t___ 14. The iamb most nearly duplicates the cadence of natural speech.

_f___ 15. Poets generally prefer the trochaic foot. _f___ 16. The pyrrhic foot consists of a single stressed or unstressed syllable by itself.

_t___ 17. Too much formal regularity in a poem can result in monotony.

_t___ 18. Too much alliteration can cause comic and catastrophic consequences.

_t___ 19. Onomatopoeic words are verbal echoes of the actions they describe.

_f___ 20. Euphony creates a "bad sound" while cacophony creates a "good sound."

_t___ 21. Rhyme promotes memory, gives delight, and inspires poetic creativity.

_f___ 22. Internal rhyme occurs at the ends of lines.

_f___ 23. In slant or inexact rhyme, the rhyming sounds are identical in spelling but different in pronunciation.

_f___ 24. A quatrain is a three-line poetic unit.

_t___ 25. Your first reading in preparation for an essay on prosody should be for comprehension.