The Ode Less Travelled Trivia Quiz

Answer: wonder

A trochee is a foot (that is, a metrical division) consisting of two syllables with a stress on the first. The other words are all iambs, with the stress on the second.

Answer: A foot with no stressed syllables.

See if you can spot the pyrrhic foot in these famous lines by Robert Frost:

'The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep.'

The poem is iambic tetrameter so you would expect there to be a stress on the final syllable of 'promises'. But that sounds silly. It's better not to stress either syllable in the foot '-mises' and so it is pyrrhic.

Answer: To be or not to be, that is the question.

Though 'I'd really like some biscuits I can dunk' is pretty weak poetry, it does have a strong (i.e. stressed) ending. A weak ending is an extra, unstressed syllable at the end of a line which doesn't change the fundamental metre of the poem.

Answer: Amphibrach

An amphibrach is a ternary foot with the stress on the second syllable. Anapaests have the stress on the third syllable, dactyls on the first syllable and molossi (I think that's probably the plural form!) have three equally stressed syllables.

Answer: I like the city of San Juan.

It's from Stephen Sondheim's lyrics for 'West Side Story'. The tune makes the stresses even clearer (on 'I' and 'ci-', both followed by two unstressed syllables forming the dactyls.) The line ends with a spondee, 'San Juan' - a binary foot with two equally stressed syllables.
Try reading the other lines with the emphasis on the first syllable and you'll soon find that they couldn't possibly be dactyls.

Answer: Slant rhyme

Slant or partial rhyme involves matching vowel sounds and similar, but not identical consonant sounds. If the consonants do not match at all, this is assonance, e.g. plough/down.

Feminine rhyme involves rhyming a stressed syllable in a foot which ends in an unstressed syllable. This last syllable is not rhymed but matched, e.g. beating/heating; battle/cattle.

Eye rhyme and rich rhyme aren't really rhyme at all. Eye rhyme involves words which look as if they rhyme but don't (e.g. love/prove) and rich rhyme involves words which sound exactly the same though they may be spelt differently (e.g. fowl/foul, weight/wait).

Answer: aaba

'A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness -
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!'

From Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the 'Ruba'iat of Omar Khayyam'.

Answer: 'Do not go gentle into that good night' by Dylan Thomas.

A villanelle is an incredibly complex sounding poetic form which is actually quite easy to write (though not to write well!). There are six stanzas. The first five have three lines and the final one has four. The first line of the poem is repeated at the end of the second and fourth stanzas and in the third line of the final stanza.

The last line of the first stanza is repeated at the end of the third, fifth and final stanza. I hope that's cleared that up!

Answer: A sestina.

If you're interested (and why wouldn't you be?) Arnaut's Algorithm for determining the rotation of the words in each stanza is available on p351 of 'The Ode Less Travelled.'

Answer: Rhyme Royal

The rhyme scheme is: ababbcc. No-one quite knows why it's called Royal, though some think it's because it was later used by Henry IV.

Hope you've enjoyed the quiz and maybe learned something to impress your friends with along the way!