Figurative Language
AP English Literature
Definition: communicates ideas beyond the literal meaning of words. Figurative language does not mean exactly what it says, but instead forces the reader to make an imaginative leap in order to comprehend the author's point. It usually involves a comparison between two things that may not, at first, seem to relate to one another. Terms that fall under the topic of figurative language are simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole. Irony, understatement, allusion also count as figurative language, but I wouldn’t recommend writing about them under the guise of figurative language. If you’re writing about irony, write about irony. (from Nancy Dean's Voice Lessons)
1. “As he stood there the sky over the house screamed. There was a tremendous ripping sound as if two giant hands had torn ten thousand miles of black lines down the seam. Montag was cut in half. He felt his chest chopped down and split apart. The jet bombers going over, going over, going over, one two, one two, one two, six of them, nine of them, twelve of them, and one and one and one and another and another and another, did all the screaming for him. He opened his own mouth and let their shriek come down and out between his bared teeth. The house shook. The flare went out in his hand. He felt his hand plunge toward the telephone.
The jets were gone. He felt his lips move, brushing the mouthpiece of the phone. “Emergency hospital.”
-- Raybradbury, Fahrenheit 451
· What forms of figurative language does Bradbury use in the passage?
Which do you think is the most effective and why?
What is the effect of so many different type of figurative language used in one sentence?
2. What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
-- Langston Hughes, “Harlem”
What types of figurative language are used in this passage?
Interpret the meaning of the two pieces of figurative language.
Apply: write several metaphors/similes to answer the questions: What happens to a love lost? Or What happens to a pain recurring?
3. Mind in its purest play is like some bat
That beats about in caverns all alone
Contriving by a kind of senseless wit
Not to conclude against a wall of stone.
It has no need to falter or explore;
Darkly it knows what obstacles are there,
And so may weave and flitter, dip and soar
In perfect courses through the blackest air
And has this simile a like perfection?
The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save
That in the very happiest intellection
A graceful error may correct the cave.
-Richard Wilbur
What is the central metaphor (extended metaphor of the poem)?
How does Wilbur develop it?
What is the turn in the final stanza?
4. A noiseless patient spider
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
-Walt Whitman
How do the two stanzas work together to form the extended metaphor?
Reflect on the meaning of the final line.
5. “We slipped into the country like thieves, onto the land that once was ours. Those who’d never been here before could at last see the Promised Land in the darkness; those who’d been deported and come back, only a shadow of that promise. Before the sun rises on this famished desert, stretching from the fiercest undertow in the Pacific to the steepest flint-tipped crest in the San Gabriel Mountains, the temperature drops to an icy chill, the border disappears, and in a finger snap of a blink of an eye, we are running, carried on the breath of a morning frost into hot kitchens to cook your food, waltzing across miles of tile floor to clean your houses, settling like dew on shaggy front lawns to cut your grass. We run into the American dream with a determination to shed everything we know and love that weighs us down if we have any hope of survival. This is how we learn to navigate the terrain.”
-Brando Skyhorse The Madonnas of Echo Park
· List examples and the types of figurative language in this passage. Which one do you like the best?
· How does Skyhorse develop the idea of immigration in the passage? What is the effect of all the figurative language on his portrayal of the American dream?