Poetic Devices

1. Poetic Devices

2. Metaphor • A metaphorstates that one thing is something else. It is a comparison, but it does NOT use like or as to make the comparison. • Function: Using appropriate metaphors appeals directly to the senses of listeners or readers, sharpening their imaginations to comprehend what is being communicated to them. Moreover, it gives a life-like quality to our conversations and to the characters of the fiction or poetry. Metaphors are also ways of thinking, offering the listeners and the readers fresh ways of examining ideas and viewing the world. Example: • Her hair is silk.

3. Tone • TONE is simply the author’s attitude toward the subject. • You can recognize the tone/attitude by the language/word choices the author uses. His language will reveal his perspective/opinion (that is, whether it is positive/negative) about the subject. • Tone must be inferredthrough the use of descriptive words. • Function: Decides how they readers read a literary piece and how they should feel while they are reading it. It stimulates the readers to read a piece of literature as a serious, comical, spectacular or distressing. In addition, tone lends shape and life to a piece of literature because it creates a mood. Moreover, tone bestows voice to characters and it throws light on the personalities and dispositions of characters that readers understand better.

4. Tone- Example • Robert Frost in the last stanza of his poem The Road Not taken gives us an insight into the effect of tone: “I shall be telling this with a sighSomewhere ages and ages hence:Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference.” • Frost tells us about his past with a “sigh”, this gives the above lines an unhappy tone. This tone leads us into thinking that the speaker in the poem had to make a difficult choice.

5. Anaphora • Repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginning of successive clauses • Function: Apart from the function of giving prominence to ideas, the use of anaphora in literature adds rhythm to it and thus, making it more pleasurable to read and easier to remember. As a literary device, anaphora serves the purpose of furnishing artistic effect to the passages of prose and poetry. As a rhetorical device, it is used to appeal to the emotions of the audience in order to persuade, inspire, motivate and encourage them.

6. Anaphora- Example “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.” -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream” speech (repetition of the phrase “I have a dream”

7. Apostrophe • A figure of speech in which some absent or nonexistent person or thing is addressed as if present and capable of understanding. • Function: By employing apostrophe in their literary works, writers try to bring abstract ideas or non-existent persons to life so that the nature of emotions they want to communicate gets across in a better way – because it is more convenient for the readers to relate themselves to the abstract emotions when they observe them in their natural surroundings. In addition, the use of apostrophe motivates the readers to develop a fresh and creative perspective.

8. Apostrophe- Example • William Shakespeare makes use of an apostrophe in his play “Macbeth”: • “Is this a dagger which I see before me,The handle toward my hand?Come, let me clutch thee!I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.” • In his mental conflict before murdering King Duncan, Macbeth has a strange vision of a dagger and talks to it as if it were another person.

9. Inversion • The syntactic reversal of the normal order of the words and phrases in a sentence, as, in English, the placing of an adjective after the noun it modifies, a verb before its subject, or a noun preceding its preposition. • Function: Like all literary devices, the main function of inversion in prose or poetry is to help the writers achieve stylistic effects like laying an emphasis on a particular point or changing the focus of the readers from a particular point. In poetry, inversions are regularly used to create rhythm, meter or rhyming scheme in the lines.

10. Inversion- Example • What a beautiful picture it is! • How wonderful the weather is today! • Read the following lines from William Wordsworth’s poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”: • “To me alone there came a thought of grief:A timely utterance gave that thought relief,And I again am strong:The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;”

11. Imagery • An author's use of vivid and descriptive language to add depth to their work. It appeals to human senses to deepen the reader's understanding of the work. • Writing that appeals to the five senses • Function: To generate a vibrant and graphic presentation of a scene that appeals to as many of the reader’s senses as possible. It aids the reader’s imagination to envision the characters and scenes in the literary piece clearly. Apart from the above mentioned function, images , which are drawn by using figures of speech like metaphor, simile, personification, onomatopoeia etc. serve the function of beautifying a piece of literature.

12. Imagery- Example • In prose, imagery aids writers to accomplish a vivid description of events. Below is an example of an effective use of imagery from E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake”: • “When the others went swimming my son said he was going in, too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.” • The images depicting the dampness of clothes, in the above lines, convey a sense of chilly sensation that we get from wet clothes.

13. Conceit • Afigure of speech in which two vastly different objects are likened together with the help of similes or metaphors. • Function: Conceit develops a comparison which is exceedingly unlikely but is, nonetheless, intellectually imaginative. Conceit examples have a surprising or shocking effect on the readers because they are novel comparisons unlike the conventional comparisons made in similes and metaphors. Allows readers to look at things in a new way.

14. Conceit- Example Shakespeare makes use of a conceit in Act 3, Scene 5 of his play “Romeo and Juliet”. Capulet comes to Juliet’s room after Romeo has left. He finds her weeping and says: • “Thou counterfeit’st a bark, a sea, a wind;For still thy eyes, which I may call the sea,Do ebb and flow with tears; the bark thy body is,Sailing in this salt flood; the winds, thy sighs;Who, raging with thy tears, and they with them,Without a sudden calm, will oversetThy tempest-tossed body.” • He compares Juliet to a boat in a storm. The comparison is an extended metaphor where he compares her eyes to a sea, her tears to a storm, her sighs to the stormy winds and her body to a boat in a storm.

15. Puritan Plain Style • Writing style reflects the plain style of their lives – spare, simple, straightforward. • The Puritan Plain Style is characterized by short words, direct statements, and references to ordinary, everyday objects. • Puritans believed that poetry should serve God by clearly expressing only useful or religious ideas. • Poetry appealing to the senses or emotions was viewed as dangerous.