Poet Alison Chisholm guides you through the language of poetry
HYMNS have long been part of the Christian tradition, and are usually set to music with a strong metrical beat. Their regular tunes provide poets who want to work on their handling of metre with the ideal opportunity to practise filling the music with the appropriate pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. For instance, you can perfect the application of ballad stanza metre (lines one and three in iambic tetrameter, two and four in iambic trimeter) by following the first four lines of the tune to O Little Town of Bethlehem.
HYPERBOLE is the literary device of exaggeration, often to an extreme degree, such as when Juliet bids Romeo A thousand times good night!