Figurative Language. . . .”C”onnotation
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anaphora
hyperbole
end-stop
in medias res
chiasmus
enjambment
asyndeton
litote
“The wind stood up and gave a shout.
He whistled on his fingers and
Kicked the withered leaves about”
(James Stephens, The Wind)
PERSONIFICATION. . . A figure of
speech in which an inanimate object or
abstraction is given human qualities or
abilities.
UNDERSTATEMENT . . . A figure of
speech in which a writer or a speaker
deliberately makes a situation seem
less important or serious than it is.
"It's just a flesh wound."
(Black Knight, after having both of his
arms cut off, in Monty Python and the
Holy Grail)
"I have to have this operation… It isn't
very serious. I have this tiny little
tumor on the brain.“
(Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The
Rye, by J. D. Salinger)
SIMILE. . .
A figure of speech in which two fundamentally unlike things are
explicitly compared, usually in a phrase introduced by like or as.
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"Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you
weep."
(Carl Sandburg)
"She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with
meat."
(James Joyce, "The Boarding House")
Now it is your turn. . . .
Write a poem that contains at least eight lines and
uses two of the devices from above. . .
Start with these lines:
The sun that brief December day
Rose cheerless over hills of gray.
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high.
anaphora
Repetition of the same word
or phrase at the start of
successive phrases clauses or
sentences.
"Hope – hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of
uncertainty. The audacity of hope!"
(Barack Obama, "The Audacity of Hope," July 27, 2004)
"We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and
oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we
shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."
(Winston Churchill, speech to the House of Commons, June 4, 1940)
"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she
walks into mine."
(Rick Blaine in Casablanca)
"I flee who chases me, and chase who flees me."
(Ovid)
"Fair is foul, and foul is fair."
(William Shakespeare, Macbeth Act 1, Scene 1)
"Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that
is good is not original, and the part that is original is not
good."
(Samuel Johnson)
"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to
preserve change amid order."
(Alfred North Whitehead)
"The value of marriage is not that adults produce children,
but that children produce adults."
A
(Peter De Vries)
chiasmus
"You can take it out of the country, but you can't take the
country out of it."
(slogan for Salem cigarettes)
verbal pattern (a type
of antithesis in which the
second half of an
expression is balanced
against the first with the
parts reversed.
: Alliteration. . .
"You'll never put a better bit of butter on your knife."
(advertising slogan for Country Life butter)
"Good men are gruff and grumpy, cranky, crabbed, and cross."
(Clement Freud)
"A moist young moon hung above the mist of a neighboring
meadow."
(Vladimir Nabokov, Conclusive Evidence, 1951)
"Guinness is good for you."
(advertising slogan)
"The soul selects her own society."
(Emily Dickinson)
“O death, where is thy sting; O grave, where is thy victory?
“Apostrophe”.
. . .speaking directly to/
addressing an inanimate object or an idea as
if it were a person. . . .
"Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
(John Donne, "Death be not proud")
"Oh! Stars and clouds and winds, ye are all about to
mock me; if ye really pity me, crush sensation and
memory; let me become as nought; but if not, depart,
depart, and leave me in darkness."
(Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818)
Song
James Russell Lowell
O moonlight deep and tender,
A year and more agone,
O stars, ye saw our meeting,
Your mist of golden splendor
Two beings and one soul,
Round my betrothal shone!
Two hearts so madly beating
To mingle and be whole!
O elm-leaves dark and dewy,
The very same ye seem,
The low wind trembles through ye,
Ye murmur in my dream!
O happy night, deliver
Her kisses back to me,
Or keep them all, and give her
A blisslul dream of me!
O river, dim with distance,
Flow thus forever by,
A part of my existence
Within your heart doth lie!
Find at least five examples of figurative
language. . . “connotation”
Litote
a figure of speech that emphasizes its
subject by conscious understatement.
For example, the understated “not bad” as a comment about
something especially well done.
George Orwell wrote “Last week I saw a woman flayed and you
would hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse,”
Asyndeton—a style in which conjunctions are
omitted, usually producing a fast-paced, more
rapid prose.
For example, Caesar’s famous lines, “I came, I saw, I
conquered,” is asyndeton.