Poetic Devices

A direct comparison that states one thing is another, without 'like' or 'as'.

• "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players." — As You Like It, Shakespeare
• "Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul." — Emily Dickinson
• "The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas." — The Highwayman, Alfred Noyes

A comparison using 'like' or 'as'.

• "O my Luve is like a red, red rose." — Robert Burns
• "As busy as a bee." — common idiom
• "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold." — The Destruction of Sennacherib, Lord Byron

Giving human qualities to non-human things or abstract ideas.

• "Because I could not stop for Death, / He kindly stopped for me." — Emily Dickinson
• "The wind whispered through the trees." — common usage
• "The fog comes on little cat feet." — Fog, Carl Sandburg

Vivid sensory language that makes a scene felt through sight, sound, smell, taste or touch.

• "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." — To Autumn, John Keats
• "The jar was round upon the ground / And tall and of a port in air." — Anecdote of the Jar, Wallace Stevens
• "The brine stung his split lip before he even saw the water." — original example

The repetition of vowel sounds in nearby words.

• "Hear the mellow wedding bells." — The Bells, Edgar Allan Poe
• "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain." — My Fair Lady
• "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary" — The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe

The repetition of initial consonant sounds in nearby words.

• "From forth the fatal loins of these two foes." — Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
• "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers." — tongue twister
• "Old English poems such as Beowulf are organized around alliteration rather than rhyme: each line's stressed words share their opening sounds." — Beowulf

A word that imitates the sound it describes.

• "How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle / In the icy air of night!" — The Bells, Edgar Allan Poe
• "Hark, hark! / Bow-wow. / The watch-dogs bark! / Bow-wow." — The Tempest, William Shakespeare
• "SMASH The door was hit with such a force that it swung clean off its hinges and with a deafening crash landed flat on the floor." — Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J.K. Rowling

A narrative poem, often in quatrains with a strong rhythm, that tells a dramatic story.

• "I met a lady in the meads, / Full beautiful, a faery's child;" — La Belle Dame sans Merci, John Keats
• "Water, water, every where, / And all the boards did shrink;" — The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• "It was many and many a year ago, / In a kingdom by the sea," — Annabel Lee, Edgar Allan Poe

A poem whose visual shape on the page reinforces its meaning.

• "Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store, / Though foolishly he lost the same," — Easter Wings, George Herbert
• "A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears, / Made of a heart and cemented with tears:" — The Altar, George Herbert
• "The word 'silence' is arranged into a block with an empty space at its centre." — Silencio, Eugen Gomringer

A brief reference to a well-known person, place, event or work.

• "He was a real Romeo with the ladies." — reference to Shakespeare
• "She had the patience of Job." — biblical reference
• "The title of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men alludes to Robert Burns's line about the best-laid schemes of mice and men going astray." — Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

Deliberate exaggeration for emphasis or effect, not meant literally.

• "I've told you a million times." — common usage
• "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse." — common idiom
• "I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers / Could not with all their quantity of love / Make up my sum." — Hamlet, Shakespeare

The regular rhythmic pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of verse.

• "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (iambic pentameter)" — Sonnet 18, Shakespeare
• "Once upon a midnight dreary (trochaic)." — The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe
• "Two households, both alike in dignity, / In fair Verona, where we lay our scene," — Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare

Two contradictory words placed together so their clash creates a new meaning.

• "Parting is such sweet sorrow." — Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
• "O brawling love! O loving hate!" — Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
• "No light, but rather darkness visible." — Paradise Lost, John Milton

A statement that appears self-contradictory but contains an underlying truth.

• "I must be cruel, only to be kind." — Hamlet, Shakespeare
• "The Child is father of the Man." — My Heart Leaps Up, William Wordsworth
• "A pilot who asks to be grounded for insanity proves, by asking, that he is sane enough to fly." — Catch-22, Joseph Heller

Referring to something by the name of a thing closely associated with it.

• "The pen is mightier than the sword." — Richelieu, Edward Bulwer-Lytton
• "The White House announced the decision this morning." — common usage
• "The crown must answer to the people." — common usage

A figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole, or the whole for a part.

• "All hands on deck." — common usage
• "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears." — Julius Caesar, Shakespeare
• "She finally bought her own set of wheels." — common usage

The use of an object, image or action to represent an idea beyond its literal meaning.

• "The green light at the end of Daisy's dock comes to stand for Gatsby's whole unreachable dream." — The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• "The conch shell stands for order and lawful authority, and shatters when both collapse." — Lord of the Flies, William Golding
• "The scarlet letter A is meant to mark shame, but Hester gradually remakes what it means." — The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

A fixed expression whose meaning cannot be worked out from the literal words.

• "Kick the bucket." — common idiom
• "Spill the beans." — common idiom
• "Under the weather." — common idiom

A play on words that exploits multiple meanings or similar sounds for wit.

• "Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man." — Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
• "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York." — Richard III, Shakespeare
• "Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest hangs its whole plot on the pun between the name Ernest and the virtue earnest." — The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde

A mild or indirect expression substituted for one considered too harsh or blunt.

• "He passed away last spring." — common usage
• "The company is letting you go." — common usage
• "Squealer announces a 'readjustment' of rations, never a reduction." — Animal Farm, George Orwell

Deliberate understatement that affirms something by negating its opposite.

• "Not bad." — common usage
• "He's no fool." — common usage
• "Old English poems such as Beowulf lean on grim understatement: a deadly battle is 'no pleasant exchange'." — Beowulf

An extended comparison that explains an unfamiliar thing in terms of a familiar one.

• "My mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." — Forrest Gump
• "As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country." — Proverbs 25:25
• "Explaining the heart as a pump - valves, pressure, flow - is the standard analogy of biology teaching." — common usage

Attributing human emotions to nature or the weather so the setting mirrors a character's feelings.

• "Lear rages on the heath while the storm rages with him." — King Lear, Shakespeare
• "The wild moorland weather of Wuthering Heights keeps pace with its characters' tempers." — Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
• "The sky had been weeping all morning, which suited everyone at the graveside." — original example

An elaborate, extended metaphor that yokes together two strikingly unlike things across a whole passage or poem.

• "Donne compares two lovers' souls to the twin legs of a drawing compass: one fixed, one roaming, always joined." — A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, John Donne
• "A flea that has bitten both lovers becomes the poem's whole case that they are already united." — The Flea, John Donne
• "Metaphysical poets like Donne and Herbert built entire poems from a single far-fetched comparison, which is why 'metaphysical conceit' names the device." — common usage

Describing one sense in terms of another - loud colours, sweet sounds, bitter cold light.

• "Dante describes reaching a place 'where the sun is silent'." — Inferno, Dante Alighieri
• "Baudelaire's Correspondances imagines perfumes 'sweet as oboes, green as meadows'." — Correspondances, Charles Baudelaire
• "The trumpet line tasted of copper and cheap sugar." — original example

Addressing an absent person, an abstract idea or a thing as if it could hear and answer.

• "O Death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" — 1 Corinthians 15:55
• "Twinkle, twinkle, little star, / How I wonder what you are." — The Star, Jane Taylor
• "O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done." — O Captain! My Captain!, Walt Whitman

The repetition of consonant sounds in nearby words, especially at the ends of syllables.

• "And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil." — God's Grandeur, Gerard Manley Hopkins
• "Pitter-patter." — common usage
• "...some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door." — The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe

The repetition of hissing 's', 'sh' and 'z' sounds for a whispering, slippery or sinister effect.

• "And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain." — The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe
• "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past." — Sonnet 30, Shakespeare
• "Something slid past the skirting board, softly, insistently." — original example

A harsh, discordant clatter of sounds used deliberately to make a passage feel ugly or violent.

• "Beware the Jabberwock, my son! / The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!" — Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll
• "Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle / Can patter out their hasty orisons." — Anthem for Doomed Youth, Wilfred Owen
• "The skip lorry clanged, ground its gears, and juddered off through the roadworks." — original example

A smooth, musical pleasantness of sound, built from soft consonants and long vowels.

• "The moan of doves in immemorial elms, / And murmuring of innumerable bees." — The Princess, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• "The lone and level sands stretch far away." — Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley
• "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." — To Autumn, John Keats

The repetition of matching end sounds between words, usually at line endings.

• "Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night;" — The Tyger, William Blake
• "I do not like green eggs and ham. / I do not like them, Sam-I-am." — Green Eggs and Ham, Dr. Seuss
• "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary - internal rhyme inside a single line." — The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe

Repeating a word, phrase or structure so it gathers weight and rhythm.

• "Break, break, break, / On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!" — Break, Break, Break, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• "In his 1941 Harrow School speech, Churchill hammered a single instruction: never give in, never, never, never." — Winston Churchill, Harrow School speech, 1941
• "The phrase 'So it goes' recurs more than a hundred times." — Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

A line or phrase repeated at intervals through a poem or song, usually at the end of a stanza.

• "Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.'" — The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe
• "Do not go gentle into that good night - repeated as the villanelle's alternating refrain." — Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, Dylan Thomas
• "And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep." — Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Robert Frost

A novel that follows a protagonist's formation from youth toward maturity.

• "Jane Eyre traces its heroine from unloved orphan to a woman who chooses her own terms." — Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
• "David Copperfield follows its narrator from birth to authorship - Dickens's own favorite of his novels." — David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
• "Scout Finch narrates her own moral education across three Maycomb summers." — To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

A speech in which a character, alone on stage, speaks their thoughts aloud.

• "To be, or not to be, that is the question." — Hamlet, Shakespeare
• "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day." — Macbeth, Shakespeare
• "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? - Juliet, believing herself alone at the window." — Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare

Running a sentence past the end of a poetic line so the meaning spills into the next.

• "I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er vales and hills - the sentence pours over the line break." — I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, William Wordsworth
• "so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow - four sentences' worth of breaks inside one sentence." — The Red Wheelbarrow, William Carlos Williams
• "Milton's blank verse in Paradise Lost runs its sense 'variously drawn out from one verse into another' - his own description of the technique." — Paradise Lost, John Milton

A deliberate pause inside a line of verse, usually marked by punctuation.

• "To be, or not to be - that is the question - the dash is the hinge the whole line swings on." — Hamlet, Shakespeare
• "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man." — An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope
• "Old English verse such as Beowulf is built on a strong mid-line pause dividing each line into two half-lines." — Beowulf