Ten(nish) Poetry Terms: Figurative Language Devices and Rhetorical Techniques
(Thank you to Dianna Krauss for many examples, etc. )
"Poetry is about slowing down. You sit and you read something, you read it again, and it reveals a little bit more, and things come to light you never could have predicted." M. Strand
1. connotation: the emotional “baggage” connected to a word: cozy vs. cramped, trudge vs. walk, naked vs. nude (in a famous poem)
2. metaphor: an implied comparison of two unlike objects (not using “like” or “as”) by identification or substitution
Death is the broom
I take it in my hands
To sweep the world clean. Langston Hughes
3. Simile: a direct comparison of two unlike objects using “like” or “as”
The holy time is quiet as a nun. Wordsworth
4. Personification: device that gives non-human ideas or objects specifically human qualities (thinking, feeling, reacting, etc. )
When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath. E. Dickinson
5. Apostrophe: (ha! not THAT kind) direct address of a person not present or a personification unable to reply
O Death, where is thy sting? W. Shakespeare
6. Metonymy: substitution of a part for the whole, OR of something related for the thing itself
Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears. W.S.
The kettle is boiling, or “All hands on deck!” R. L.
7. Irony: a discrepancy between. . .
•what is meant and what is said: verbal
•what the character says and the author means, or what a character knows and the audience knows: dramatic
•what we expect to happen and what does happen: situational
Examples: Siegfried Sassoon’s “Base Details”; Oedipus Rex; “Love in Brooklyn”
Related terms: hyperbole and oxymoron
8. Allusion: a common cultural reference, often to Greek mythology or the Bible
“Abraham to kill him/Was distinctly told. . .” Dickinson
9. Imagery: sensory description: language that makes you hear, see, feel, smell, taste details from the poem
“Then a mile of warm, sea-scented beach. . . “ Browning
10. Symbolism: the use of one object to suggest other idea/s as well as itself
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I-/I took the one less traveled by”
Frost
Sound/Meter Terms
Alliteration: use of repeated consonant sounds in important words for an effect
“The lilies and languors of virtue,
. . . . the roses and raptures of vice.” AC Swinburne
NOTE: varsity poetry folk: consonance refers to the use of repeated consonants that are not the first letter of the word; alliteration officially refers ONLY to the use of initial consonants. However, for most of us mortals, ‘alliteration’ fills the bill.
Assonance: Use of repeated vowel sounds in important words for an effect
. . . “Veering and wheeling free in the open” C. Sandburg
Onomatopoeia: use of words that sound like what they mean
“The murmur of innumerable bees. . . “ Tennyson
If the overall use of sound is pleasant, it creates EUPHONY; if the overall use of sound is harsh and unpleasant, it creates DISSONANCE.
Meter: the regular arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry.
“Twin-kle, twin-kle, lit-tle star / How I won-der what you are.”
IAMBIC PENTAMETER: the most common form of meter, used most notably by Shakespeare, composed of five (pent-) pairs of one unstressed and one stressed syllable (iambs):
“These GLOWing FEAthers PLUCK’D from CAEsar’s WING
Will MAKE him FLY an ORdinARy PITCH
Who ELSE would SOAR aBOVE the VIEW of MEN
And LEAVE us ALL in SERvile FEARfulNESS.” oh yeah. Julius Caesar! 1977!