Figures of Speech
It is imperative that you know and understand the following figures of speech. It is not enough to know the word and the definition. You must be able to identify and explain the function of the following figures of speech within all pieces of literature this year.
Figures of speech are words or phrases that describe one thing in terms of something else. They always involve some sort of imaginative comparison between seemingly unlike things. Not meant to be taken literally, figurative language is used to produce images in a reader’s mind and to express ideas in fresh, vivid, and imaginative ways. The most common examples of figurative language, or figures of speech, used in both prose and poetry, are simile, metaphor, and personification.
1. Apostrophe – a form of personification in which the absent or dead are spoken to as if present and the inanimate, as if animate
Ø In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
Antony. O judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason! (III, ii, 106-107)
2. Metaphor – a comparison of two unlike things NOT using like or as
Ø In Bronte’s Jane Eyre:
“The gaping wound of my wrongs, too, was now quite healed; and the flame of resentment extinguished” (XXVI, 258).
Jane has returned to Gateshead to visit her aunt Mrs. Reed on her deathbed. She calls her old emotional hurt a “wound” and her resentment “flame,” and both are now gone.
3. Metonymy - (a from of a metaphor) In metonymy, the name of one thing is applied to another thing which is closely associated.
Ø In Anne Sexton’s poem “Courage”
“When they called you crybaby/or poor or fatty or crazy/and made you drink their acid/and concealed it” (11. 8-12)
The taunts of others hurt a person’s feelings. The speaker calls the taunts acid, an appropriate term because they do sting or burn a person emotionally.
4. Oxymoron – a form of paradox that combines a pair of opposite terms into a single unusual expression
Ø Martin Espada’s poem “Tony Went to the Bodega but He Didn’t Buy Anything”:
So Tony walked without a map
through the city,
a landscape of hostile condominiums
and the darkness of white faces,
sidewalk-searcher lost
till he discovered the projects. (11. 25-30)
Tony feels out of place in the Anglo world and sees hostility (darkness) in their faces (white).
5. Paradox – occurs when the elements of a statement contradict each other. Although the statement may appear illogical, impossible, or absurd, it turns out to have a coherent meaning that reveals a hidden truth.
Ø Emily Dickinson:
“Much madness is divinest sense”
6. Personification – a kind of metaphor that gives inanimate objects or abstract ideas human characteristics
Ø Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18:
“Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, / And often is his gold complexion dimmed” (11. 5-6).
The speaker compares his love to a summer day and claims summer has flaws, but his love doesn’t. The scale of the comparison suggests the importance of the lover in the speaker’s life.
7. Pun – a play on words that are identical or similar in sound but have sharply diverse meanings
Ø In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:
Mercutio. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. (III, i, 99-101)
Puns can have serious as well as humorous uses.
8. Simile – a comparison of two different things or ideas through the use of the words like or as
Ø In Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees:
“She didn’t miss the books so much as she was hurt by the ugly empty spaces left behind, like missing teeth, the books on either side falling and crowding into the gaps” (32).
Kingsolver’s comparison of missing books to missing teeth strengthens the lonely feelings the speaker experiences after her husband leaves her.
9. Synecdoche – a form of metaphor
Ø In synecdoche, a part of something is used to signify the whole:
“All hands on deck.”
Ø The reverse is also true where the whole can represent a part:
“Canada played the United States in the Olympic hockey finals.”
Ø Another form of synecdoche involves the container representing the thing being contained:
“The pot is boiling.”
Ø In one last form of synecdoche, the material from which an object is made stands for the object itself:
“The quarterback tossed the pigskin.”
All words and definitions come from The College Board’s Laying the Foundation: A Resource & Planning Guide for Pre-AP English Grade 10.