Literary Devices
By Jonathan Westerberg
Mira Costa High School
English 1-2 CP
SIMILE
an explicit comparison between two things using
'like' or 'as'.
 *Reason is to faith as the eye to the telescope.
- D. Hume [?]
 *Let us go then, you and I,
While the evening is spread out against the sky,
Like a patient etherized upon a table...
-T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
 Your love is like bad medicine
-Jon Bon Jovi
Metaphor
implied comparison wherein the author says something is
something else; not used in the literal sense; used to show
similarities between two different things and to shed new light
on the object of the metaphor
*Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage.
-Shakespeare, Macbeth
*. . . while he learned the language (that meager and fragile thread . . . by
which the little surface corners and edges of men's secret and solitary lives
may be joined for an instant now and then before sinking back into the
darkness. . . )
- Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
*From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has
descended across the continent.
-W. Churchill
PERSONIFICATION
Giving human characteristics to non-human
things or abstract ideas.
*England expects every man to do his duty.
-Lord Nelson
* jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
OXYMORON
apparent paradox achieved by the
juxtaposition of words which seem to
contradict one another.
*jumbo shrimp
*I must be cruel only to be kind.
-Shakespeare, Hamlet
HYPERBOLE
exaggeration for emphasis or humor
*My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thine forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest.
-Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"
*I was stuck in traffic forever!
DRAMATIC IRONY
when the audience possesses an
awareness greater than that of one or
more characters on stage
*Madam, if you could find out but a man
To bear the poison, I would temper it;
-Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
IMAGERY
the use of vivid detail and concrete,
sensory description to create imagery
in the mind of the reader
*Although there was evening brightness showing
through the windows of the bunk house, inside it was
dusk.
-Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
Pun
a play on words; using the dual
meaning or sound of a word to create
alternate meanings in its use.
In the office she was frantically looking for her false
nails only to find that she had filed them away.
FORESHADOWING
when the author drops subtle hints
about events that will happen later in
the story
Alliteration
The repetition of certain sounds to
create a poetic flow.
 “During the whole of a dull, dark day”
- “The Fall of the House of Usher”- Poe