Figurative Language - Poetic Devices, The "What is?" thread Options

[Cleo_Serapis]

Figurative Language


Similes explicitly compare items from different classes using a connective such as “like”, “as”, or “than”, or by a verb such as “appears” or “seems”. The catch here is in the object being compared. If the objects are in the same class, as in this phrase, “New York is like London” there is no simile.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.
~Anonymous

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.
The holy time is quiet as a nun,
Breathless with adoration.
~Wordsworth

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
to have a thankless child.
~Shakespeare

Metaphor asserts the identity (an implied comparison), without a connective such as “like” or a verb such as “appears”, of the terms that are literally incomparable. Metaphor uses mechanisms outside the realm of everyday conventional language.

She is the rose, the glory of the day.
~Spenser

O western orb sailing the heaven.
~Whitman

‘Orb’ is the stated word above, when matched with ‘sailing’ however, a ‘ship’ is implied in ‘sailing’.

Personification asserts an attribution of human characteristics or feelings to an inanimate object (something nonhuman) or abstraction; a subtype of metaphor in which the figurative term is always a human being.

But Time did beckon to the flowers, and they
by noon most cunningly did steal away.
~Herbert

Hope, thou bold taster of delight.
~Crashaw

Apostrophe addresses someone absent or something nonhuman as if it were alive or present and could respond.

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
~Blake

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
~Shelley

Imagery is a representation in words of a sensory experience; words which appeal to one or more of the senses; a visual image or mental picture.

The goat-footed balloonMan whistles"
~Cummings

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
~Frost

Symbolism is a specific idea or object that may stand for ideas, values, persons or ways of life; something that means more than what it is.

O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm
that flies in the night
in the howling storm

has found out thy bed
of crimson joy,
and his dark secret love
does thy life destroy.
~Blake

Verbal Irony is when one says the opposite of what is actually meant.

The grave’s a fine and private place,
but none, I think, do there embrace.
~Marvell

Paradox is an apparent contradiction, which is actually true.

The child is father of the man.
~Wordsworth

The saviors come not home tonight;
themselves they could not save.
~Housman

Alliteration is the deliberate repetition of consonant sounds, i.e. the Weeping willow whispered....

Assonance is the deliberate repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds, i.e. Boo flew to a new pool.

Diction is the poet's distinctive choices in vocabulary.

Echo is the repetition of a key word or idea for effect.

Hyperbole is an exaggeration for dramatic effect.

Onomatopoeia is "sound echoing sense"; the use of words resembling the sounds they mean. For example, in “Song of the Lotus-Eaters” Tennyson indicates the slow, sensuous, and langorous life of the Lotus-Eaters by the sound of the words he uses to describe the land in which they live:
Here are cool mosses deep,
And through the moss the ivies creep,
And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,
And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.

Oxymoron is a seeming contradiction in two words put together, i.e. Jumbo Shrimp, Thunderous Silence.

Rhyme a repetition of the same sounds, i.e. fog, dog.

Rhythm is the internal 'feel' of a beat and meter perceived when poetry is read aloud.

Tone, Mood are feelings or meanings conveyed in the poem.