Literary Devices
Figurative language and types of poems
Figurative language
• A form of language use in which writers and
speakers convey something other than the literal
meaning of their words.
• Examples:
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Hyperbole
exaggeration
Simile
metaphor
Literal language
• A form of language in which writers and
speakers mean exactly what their words
mean.
• When you say that is cold you mean it is cold in
temperature.
• The comedian died on the stage. (literal
meaning - he actually died)
Stanza
• A grouping of lines separated from others in a
poem.
• The stanza is like a prose paragraph.
Symbol
• An object or action in a literary work that
means more than itself, that stands for
something beyond itself.
• A rose, for example, has long been considered
a symbol of love and affection.
Imagery
• an author's use of vivid and descriptive
language to add depth to their work.
• Examples
• He fumed and charged like an angry bull.
• He fell down like an old tree falling down in a
storm.
• He felt like the flowers were waving him a hello.
• The eerie silence was shattered by her scream.
Connotation
• a word that goes beyond its dictionary
meaning. The emotional meaning.
Denotation
• is the literal meaning, the dictionary meaning of
a word.
Meter
• The rhythmical pattern of stressed and unstressed
syllables in verse.
Rhythm
• The audible pattern of accent or stress in lines
of verse. In the following lines from "Same in
Blues" by Langston Hughes, the accented words
and syllables are underlined:
• I said to my baby,
Baby take it slow....
Lulu said to Leonard
I want a diamond ring
Another example is Edgar Allen Poe’s the Bells
The Bells
in the rhythm of Ms. Jefferis high school choir.
• Hear the sledges with the bells Silver bells! Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that over sprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.
Rhyme
• The matching of final vowel or consonant sounds in two or more
words.
• The following stanza of "Richard Cory" employs alternate rhyme,
with the third line rhyming with the first and the fourth with the second:
• Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him;
He was a gentleman from sole to crown
Clean favored and imperially slim.
• A rhyme scheme is usually the pattern of end rhymes in a
stanza, with each rhyme encoded by a letter of the alphabet,
from a onward (ABBA BCCB, for example). Rhymes are
classified by the degree of similarity between sounds within
words, and by their placement within the lines or stanzas
End rhyme,
• the most common type, is the rhyming of the
final syllables of a line. See “Midstairs” by
Virginia Hamilton Adair:
And here on this turning of the stair
Between passion and doubt,
I pause and say a double prayer,
One for you, and one for you;
And so they cancel out.
Internal rhyme
• is rhyme within a single line of verse When a word
from the middle of a line is rhymed with a word at
the end of the line.
• I had a cat who wore a hat
• He looked cool but felt the fool
• Edgar Allen Poe ‘The Raven’
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary
Allusion
• A brief reference to a historical, mythic, or
literary person, place, event, or movement.
• “I was surprised his nose was not growing like
Pinocchio’s.” This refers to the story of
Pinocchio, where his nose grew whenever he
told a lie. It is from The Adventures of
Pinocchio, written by Carlo Collodi.
• Heading down the rabbit hole is an allusion to
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Alliteration
• the deliberate repetition of consonant sounds
• Alliteration does not need to be every word in the
line nor the same letter. I keep the cat in a cage.
• “We saw the sea sound sing, we heard the salt
sheet tell,” from Dylan Thomas’s “Lie Still, Sleep
Becalmed.”
• Tongue twisters are alliterated.
• Amy Always answers abruptly.
Consonance
• Is a type of alliteration. The repetitive sounds produced by
consonants within a sentence or phrase. It does not have to
be at the start of the word
• “T was later when the summer went” by Emily Dickson:
‘T was later when the summer went
Than when the cricket came,
And yet we knew that gentle clock
Meant nought but going home.
‘T was sooner when the cricket went
Than when the winter came,
Yet that pathetic pendulum
Keeps esoteric time.
• The M sound is repeated
Assonance
• The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a
sentence or a line of poetry or prose.
• I rose and told him of my woe.”
• Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer”
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself."
Hyperbole
• A figure of speech involving exaggeration.
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I am so hungry I could eat a horse.
I have a million things to do.
I had a ton of homework.
I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.
Personification
• A figure of speech in which the poet describes, a
thing, or a nonhuman form as if it were a person.
• An example: "The yellow leaves flaunted their
color gaily in the breeze." Wordsworth's "I
wandered lonely as a cloud" includes
personification.
• The movie cars and planes use personification
Irony
• A contrast between what is said and what is
meant or a contrast between what happens
and what is expected to happen in life and in
literature.
‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Coleridge
• “Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.”
Onomatopoeia
• The use of words to imitate the sounds they
describe.
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Buzz
Crack
choo-choo
hiss
• Most often refers to words and groups of words,
such as Tennyson's description of the "murmur of
innumerable bees," which attempts to capture the
sound of a swarm of bees buzzing.
Metaphor
• A comparison between essentially unlike things
without an explicitly comparative word such as like
or as.
• An example is "My love is a red, red rose,”
Oxymoron
• A figure of speech that brings together
contradictory words for effect.
• jumbo shrimp
• deafening silence
Simile
• A comparison made with “as,” “like,” or “than.”
In “A Red, Red Rose,” Robert Burns declares:
O my Love is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Love is like the melody
That’s sweetly played in tune.
Love is being compared to a rose and a melody.
Pun
• is a form of word play that suggests two or more
meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of
words, or of similar-sounding words, for an
intended humorous or rhetorical effect.
• I went to a seafood disco last week....and pulled a
mussel.
• I work as a baker because I knead dough
• Sir Lancelot once had a very bad dream about his
horse. It was a knight mare.
Palindrome
• A word, phrase, or sentence that reads the
same backward and forward.
• civic
• Level
• A man, a plan, a canal—Panama
• The reversal can be word by word as well
• as in fall leaves when leaves fall.
Couplet
• A pair of rhymed lines that may or may not
constitute a separate stanza in a poem.
• Shakespeare's sonnets end in rhymed
couplets, as in "For thy sweet love
remembered such wealth brings / That then I
scorn to change my state with kings.”
Forms of poetry
Haiku
• A Japanese verse form of three unrhyming lines in
five, seven, and five syllables. It creates a single,
memorable image, as in these lines by Kobayashi
Issa, translated by Jane Hirshfield:
On a branch
floating downriver
a cricket, singing.
(In translating from Japanese to English,
Hirshfield compresses the number of syllables.)
Limerick
• A humorous poem of five lines rhyming
AABBA.
• A Clumsy Young Fellow Named Tim
There once was a fellow named Tim (A)
whose dad never taught him to swim. (A)
He fell off a dock (B)
and sunk like a rock. (B)
And that was the end of him. (A)
Lyric poem
• A type of poem characterized by the expression
of feeling.
• The anonymous "Western Wind”
Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
• It expresses the feeling of the wind.
Ode
• A long, stately poem in stanzas of varied
length, meter, and form. Usually a serious
poem on an exalted subject.
• Horace's "Eheu fugaces,"
• but sometimes a more lighthearted work, such
as Neruda's "Ode to My Socks."
Parody
• A humorous, mocking imitation of a literary
work, sometimes sarcastic, but often playful and
even respectful in its playful imitation.
Quatrain
• A four-line stanza, rhyming in a pattern - like
ABAC, ABCB, ABBA, AABA
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-AABA, the stanza of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
Whose woods these are I think I know. A
His house is in the village though; A
He will not see me stopping here B
To watch his woods fill up with snow. A
Elegy
• A lyric poem that laments the dead.
Epic
• A long narrative poem that records the
adventures of a hero. Epics typically chronicle
the origins of a civilization and embody its
central values.
Free verse
• non rhyming lines that closely follow the
natural rhythms of speech. A regular pattern
of sound or rhythm may emerge in free-verse
lines, but the poet does not plan it in their
composition.
Blank verse
• A unrhymed line of poetry or prose
Ballad
• A popular narrative song passed down orally.
In the English tradition, it usually follows a
form of rhymed (abcb) quatrains alternating
four-stress and three-stress lines. Folk (or
traditional) ballads are anonymous and
recount tragic, comic, or heroic stories with
emphasis on a central dramatic event.
Concrete poetry
• Verse that emphasizes physical elements, such as
a typeface that creates a visual image of the
topic.
Sonnet
• A 14-line poem with a variable rhyme scheme
originating in Italy and then to England in the 16th
century. Literally a “little song,” the sonnet
traditionally reflects upon a single sentiment, with a
clarification or “turn” of thought in its concluding
lines.
• The Shakespearean or English sonnet is arranged as
three quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming abab
cdcd efef gg. The Petrarchan or Italian sonnet
divides into two parts: an eight-line octave and a sixline sestet, rhyming abba abba cde cde or abba abba
cd cd cd.
Tone
• The implied attitude of a writer toward the
subject and characters of a work.