Rhyme’s Reason: Poetry: Literary Devices

Note the alliteration of the "b" sound in the second line of this excerpt and the alliteration of the "t" sound in the third line.

An allusion is a reference in a text to an external person, place, or event or to another literary work. In this passage, Shakespeare includes allusions to two figures from classical mythology, Niobe and Hercules.

The repetition of the words "in every" at the beginning of the first three lines of this stanza is an example of anaphora. Poets typically use anaphora to emphasize particular words or ideas.

In this poem, the speaker directly addresses Death. Examples of apostrophe include addressing a real but absent person, addressing an object or entity such as the moon, or addressing an abstraction such as death or hope.

The repeated long e sound in leaping and deep creates assonance in the last line of this excerpt.

The word chiasmus comes from a Greek root meaning "to make an X" — so think of the words or phrases in chiasmus as having an X shape or criss-crossing. Keats uses chiasmus in the first line of the poem: beauty/truth/truth/beauty.

A conceit is a complex extended metaphor comparing two dissimilar things. In this famous example of a conceit, Donne compares the souls of two people to the legs of a compass.

A connotation is a feeling or idea suggested by a word, as distinct from the word's literal meaning. In this short poem by Robert Frost, the words fire and ice are used literally, but they also have connotations that enhance the meaning and complexity of the poem. Connotations of fire include passion and fervor, while connotations of ice include coldness and lack of emotion.

The repetition of the s sound at the end of pathless, seamless, and peerless is an example of consonance.

Think of the denotation as the dictionary definition of a word. In this passage, the denotation of frigate is "a medium-sized warship" and the denotation of courser is "a war horse." Both of these words also have connotations that are essential to understanding the poem: both frigates and coursers are known for their speed, and because they are both used in battle, they also connote strength and power.

The first line in this example is end-stopped: it forms a complete thought and ends with a decisive punctuation mark. The second line, however, uses enjambment: the thought expressed in this line is incomplete and continues into the next line, without any intervening punctuation.

A poetic envoy (or envoi) is a short concluding stanza in which a poet "sends forth" a poem. An envoy can summarize, dedicate, or reflect on a poem, or even "speak to" the poem directly. In this envoy by Austin Dobson, the poet imagines his poem as a laurel wreath that will honor heroic deeds of the past.

In this example of hyperbole, the poem's speaker describes his love in extravagant, exaggerated terms that go beyond the bounds of what is possible.

An invocation is a specific type of apostrophe (see above). In a literary invocation, the poet calls upon a muse or another deity to assist in the composition of the poem. Invocations are common in epic poems such as Paradise Lost.

The sailors in this poem are surrounded by water but, ironically, they are also suffering from severe thirst.

Litotes is a form of understatement that uses a negation such as the word "not." For example, when you say that a movie was "not half bad" to mean that the movie was quite good, you are using litotes. In this example of litotes from Hamlet, when Claudius declares that Fortinbras has "not failed to pester us," he means that Fortinbras has been pestering him constantly.

In this example, the poem's speaker uses a metaphor to compare herself to a "black ocean." A metaphor is an indirect comparison, meaning that it does not use a word such as like or as.

When you employ metonymy, you refer to one thing by means of something that is related to that thing. The saying "The pen is mightier than the sword" uses metonymy twice: the word pen means "writing," while the word sword means "military force." In the example from Macbeth, Macbeth makes a toast to "the whole table." He is not, of course, literally referring to the table itself, but to the people seated at the table.

A motif can be an archetype, a symbol, a color, an event, an idea — any pattern that recurs both within a single work of literature and across texts. In Paradise Lost, Milton frequently uses the motif of darkness and light.

This poem by Shel Silverstein is full of onomatopoeic words such as crash and baroom. Onomatopoeia also includes animal noises such as purr, caw, and woof.

This excerpt from Romeo and Juliet is full of oxymorons, such as "fiend angelical" and "honourable villain." Shakespeare uses oxymorons here to express Juliet's violent, contradictory emotions after learning that her beloved Romeo has killed her beloved cousin.

Pope uses a paradox in the second line of this example, in which he explains that humanity is simultaneously "lord of all things" and "a prey to all," a seeming contradiction.

Wendy Cope uses the comical form of the limerick to parody T.S. Eliot's serious modernist masterpiece, The Waste Land. Eliot's poem famously opens with the line, "April is the cruellest month..."

While a parody imitates another work or style in order to evoke ridicule, a pastiche is a type of imitation that pays homage to the original work. As the subtitle of the work suggests, Auden's The Age of Anxiety is a pastiche of the eclogue, a pastoral poem usually involving dialogue between shepherds. In its form, this poem also imitates Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry.

A persona is a character or speaker who narrates a poem. In some poems, such as Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," the poet may write from the point of view of an identifiable character (in this case, the Duke of Fererra). However, persona is also used more generally to refer to a first-person speaker of a poem who is distinct from the poet.

The poem "Mirror" is an example of extended personification: the entire poem is narrated by a mirror that observes and interprets the world it sees.

The repetition in the last lines of this stanza reinforces both the speaker's weariness and the distance he still has to travel.

This stanza uses an AABB rhyme scheme, meaning that the first and second lines rhyme with each other (away/stay), and the third and fourth lines rhyme with each other (grows/rose).

A simile makes an explicit comparison by using the word like or as to express a resemblance between two things.

In this poem, the raven that intrudes on the speaker's solitude in the middle of the night can be interpreted as a symbol of sorrow, loss, or death.

Synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part of something is used to refer to a whole. For instance, you might say, "I got a new set of wheels" to mean "I got a new car." In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Coleridge uses the word wave to refer to the ocean as a whole.

Many aspects of a poem, including diction, imagery, and figurative language can contribute toward the tone. In this poem by William Blake, the dark colors ("darkness," "grey despair"), the repetition of the word dread, and the alliteration of hard "d" sounds all contribute toward the solemn, pessimistic tone.

Although it is now common to use the word trope to refer to a plot convention in television, film, or fiction (e.g., the damsel in distress, the revelation of a secret twin), the word has a distinct meaning in literary studies. A trope is a figure of speech such as a metaphor, synecdoche, or oxymoron — in other words, a rhetorical device in which language is used in a non-literal way. In the example on the left, Millay uses a trope, a metaphor comparing the speaker's heart to a house.

There are two examples of zeugma in these lines. The word stain governs both honour and brocade, and the word lose governs both heart and necklace.