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:• 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 LeonardI want a diamond ring

Another example is Edgar Allen Poe’s the Bells

• 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.

The Bells in the rhythm of Ms. Jefferis high school choir.

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 crownClean 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 clockMeant nought but going home.‘T was sooner when the cricket wentThan when the winter came,Yet that pathetic pendulumKeeps 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.

•  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.

• 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 TimThere 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 armsAnd 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

•-AABA, the stanza of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

Whose woods these are I think I know. AHis house is in the village though; AHe will not see me stopping here BTo 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 six-line 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.