POETIC DEVICES (Adapted from Chris Baldick’s The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 1991)

LANGUAGE IN POETRY that departs from its accepted conventional literal sense, changes the normal order of the elements, repeats them, etc.

(a) Language that changes the literal SENSE of elements

SIMILE: an explicit comparison between two different things, ideas or actions, using the words “as” or “like”: I wandered lonely as a cloud (Wordsworth).
An EPIC SIMILE is an extended comparison, typical of epic poems, that is elaborated in great detail and embellishes the narration.

METAPHOR: one thing, idea or action (TENOR) is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting something else (VEHICLE), so as to suggest a common
quality (GROUND) in them: All the world is a stage (Shakespeare, As You Like It) [the world= tenor; stage = vehicle]. A CONCEIT is an elaborate and complicated
metaphor. John Donne famously compared two lovers to a pair of compasses in his poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”.

SYMBOL: a word or phrase which stands for or signifies something else. A symbol differs from a metaphor in that its application is left open as an unstated
suggestion. While in a metaphor we have a tenor that is described through a vehicle, we could say that in a symbol we only have a vehicle, without a definite tenor.
Think about this example made up using Blake’s poetry:
“Revolution [tenor] is a tiger [vehicle] that burns in the forests of the night”: the metaphor describes the tenor (revolution) in terms of the vehicle (tiger)
“Tyger, tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night”: we sense that the tiger stands for (is the vehicle for) something else, but what the tenor might be remains
unclear, open to speculation and several possibilities.

METONYMY: the name of something is replaced by the name of something else closely related to it: “the bottle” for alcoholic drink; “Mozart” for Mozart’s music,
“the pen” for writing, etc. SYNECDOCHE is a type of metonymy in which something is referred to by naming only some part or constituent of it: “hands” for
manual workers; “Moscow” for the Soviet government. Another kind is ANTONOMASIA, in which a proper name is replaced by an epithet (“the Bard” for
Shakespeare) or a proper name is applied to a person who has a quality associated with it (“a Casanova”; “a little Hitler”).

PERSONIFICATION (PROSOPOPOEIA): animals, abstract ideas, or inanimate things are referred as if they were human or animate:
Music’s golden tongue (Keats, “The Eve of St Agnes”).

IRONY: in a general sense, a discrepancy between what is said and what is meant:
With plough and spade and hoe and loom, / Trace your grave, and build your tomb (Shelley, “Song—To the Men of England”).

PUN (PARONOMASIA): two distinct meanings are suggested by the same word or by two similar-sounding words:
Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man (wounded Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet)

SYNESTHESIA: one type of sensation is described in terms more appropriate for another: loud yellow

HYPERBOLE (overstatement): I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers / Could not, with all their quantity of love / Make up my sum (Shakespeare, Hamlet); the
opposite is LITOTES (understatement): an affirmation is made indirectly by denying its opposite: It’s not bad.

 OXYMORON: combination of two contradictory terms in a compressed paradox: Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health (Romeo and Juliet).

(b) Language that changes the ORDER or creates REPETITION of elements

1. words, phrases and clauses

HYPERBATON: the normal order of the words is altered: The music, yearning like a god in pain, / She scarcely heard […] (John Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes”).

ANAPHORA: a word or phrase is repeated in (typically at the beginning of) successive lines, clauses or sentences:
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, / This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, /This other Eden, demi-paradise, / This fortress built by Nature for herself
(Shakespeare, Richard II). When the word or phrase is repeated at the end, we speak of EPISTROPHE:
Hourly joys be still upon you! / Juno sings her blessings on you. / Scarcity and want shall shun you, / Ceres' blessing so is on you (Shakespeare, The Tempest).

ANADIPLOSIS: a word or phrase appears both at the end of one clause, sentence or stanza, and at the beginning of the next, thus linking the two:
Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love (Shakespeare, Sonnet 154)

2. Repetition and patterns of sounds

ALLITERATION: repetition of the initial consonants of words or of stressed syllables of neighbouring words: the furrow followed free (Coleridge, “The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner”).

ASSONANCE: repetition of vocalic sounds in neighbouring words: Green as a dream and deep as death (Rupert Brooke, “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”).

CONSONANCE: repetition of consonant sounds at the end of neighbouring words: hot foot; most frequently, repetition in which the words are identical except for
the stressed vowel sound: group/grope; middle/muddle; wonder/wander

ONOMATOPOEIA: a resemblance between what a piece of language sounds like and what it refers to:
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours (Keats, “To Autumn”)

(c) Language that produces special forms of address or inquiry

APOSTROPHE: address to a dead person (Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour [Wordsworth, “London 1802”]), to an animal or an inanimate force of nature
(O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being [Shelley “Ode to the West Wind]), or to an abstraction (Hence, loathèd Melancholy, [Milton, “L’Allegro”])

RHETORICAL QUESTION: a question asked for the sake of persuasive effect (to express intense conviction of a certain view) rather than as a genuine request
for information: For what can war but endless war still breed? (Milton)