Std XII Figures of Speech

*** Teachers please note -

 In Std XII,questions may be set only on the following figures of speech. During the course of
explanation, any other relevant figures of speech may be pointed outto enhance appreciation and
understanding of the poems.
 Thiseffort issolely with the aim to obtain only one answer to a question and do away with
ambiguity keeping in mind the MCQ paper pattern & the problems that arise during assessment.
 During paper setting, we have to be careful, particularly while setting questions on figures of
speech as some lines of the poems have been rearranged in some editions of the text. To be
specific the first part of poem no. 1- My Mother at Sixty-six and the last stanza of the second
poem- An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum.
 While teaching these poems, the rearrangement of lines should be brought to the notice of
students.
 1.My Mother at Sixty-six

Kamala Das
Driving from my parent’shometo Cochin last Friday
morning, I saw my mother,beside me,
doze, open mouthed, her faceashen like that
of a corpse and realised withpain Simile
that she was as old as shelooked but soon
put that thought away, andlooked out at Young
Trees sprinting, the merry children spilling Personification
out of their homes, but after the airport’s
security check, standing a few yards
away, I looked again at her, wan,pale
as a late winter’s moon and felt that oldSimile
familiar ache, my childhood’s fear,
but all I said was, see you soon, Amma,
all I did was smile and smile and smile......Repetition

Please note-
Line 5- is printed differently in some editions - that she was as old as shelooked but
soon / that she looked as old as she was. However, this makes no difference to the
meaning of the poem.
 2. An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum
Stephen Spender
Far far from gusty waves these children’s faces.Repetition
Like rootless weeds, the hair torn round their pallor: Simile
The tall girl with her weighed-down head. The paper-
seeming boy, with rat’s eyes. The stunted, unlucky heir Metaphor
Of twisted bones, reciting a father’s gnarled disease,
His lesson, from his desk. At back of the dim class
One unnoted, sweet and young. His eyes live in a dream,
Of squirrel’s game, in tree room, other than this.

On sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare’s head,

Cloudless at dawn, civilized dome riding all cities. Personification
Belled, flowery, Tyrolese valley. Open-handed map
Awarding the world its world. And yet, for these Repetition
Children, these windows, not this map, their world,
Where all their future’s painted with a fog, Metaphor
A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky Metaphor
Far far from rivers, capes, and stars of words. Repetition

Surely, Shakespeare is wicked, the map a bad example,

With ships and sun and lovetempting them to steal—Personification
For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes
From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children Rhetorical Q
Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel Alliteration
With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones. Simile
All of their time and space are foggy slum.
So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.

Unless, governor, inspector, visitor, Anti-climax

This map becomes their window and these windows
That shut upon their lives like catacombs, Simile
Break O break open till they break the town Repetition
And show the children to green fields, and make their world
Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues
Run naked into books the white and green leaves open
History theirs whose language is the sun.
 3. Keeping Quiet
Pablo Neruda
Now we will count to twelve Alliteration
and we will all keep still. Alliteration

For once on the face of the Earth,

let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment

without rush, without engines; Repetition
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea

would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands. Alliteration

Those who prepare green wars,

wars with gas, wars with fire, Repetition
victory with no survivors, Paradox
would put on clean clothes Alliteration
and walk about with their
brothers
 in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be

confused
with total inactivity. Euphemism
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death. Antithesis
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death.

Perhaps the Earth can teach us Personification

as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive. Antithesis

Now I’ll count up to twelve

and you keep quiet and I will go.

*** Please note-

Be careful while framing the question on Antithesis as the words “dead’ and ‘alive’ are in
different lines.
 4. A Thing of Beauty
John Keats
A thing of beauty is a joy forever Metaphor
Its loveliness increases, it will never
Pass into nothingness; but will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, Alliteration
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall Personification
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon Antithesis
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make Alliteration
'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms;
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink, Hyperbole
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.
 5. A Roadside Stand
Robert Frost
The littleold house was out with a little new shed Repetition
In front at the edge of the road where the traffic sped,
A roadside stand that too pathetically pled, Personification
It would not be fair to say for a dole of bread,
But for some of the money, the cash, whose flow supports
The flower of cities from sinking and withering faint.
The polished traffic passed with a mind ahead, Personification
Or if ever aside a moment, then out of sorts
At having the landscape marred with the artless paint
Of signs that with N turned wrong and S turned wrong Repetition
Offered for sale wild berries in wooden quarts,
Or crook-necked golden squash with silver warts,
Or beauty rest in a beautiful mountain scene,
You have the money, but if you want to be mean,
Why keep your money (this crossly) and go along.
The hurt to the scenery wouldn’t be my complaint
So much as the trusting sorrow of what is unsaid: Personification
Here far from the city we make our roadside stand
And ask for some city money to feel in hand
To try if it will not make our being expand,And give us the life of the moving-pictures’
promise
That the party in power is said to be keeping from us.It is in the news that all these pitiful
kin
Are to be bought out and mercifully gathered in
To live in villages, next to the theatre and the store,
Where they won’t have to think for themselves anymore,
While greedy good-doers, beneficent beasts of prey, Alliteration
Swarm over their lives enforcing benefits
That are calculated to soothe them out of their wits
And by teaching them how to sleep they sleep all day, Repetition
Destroy their sleeping at night the ancient way.
Sometimes I feel myself I can hardly bear
The thought of so much childish longing in vain,
The sadness that lurks near the open window there, Personification
That waits all day in almost open prayer
For the squeal of brakes, the sound of a stopping car, Onomatopoeia
Of all the thousand selfish cars that pass, Hyperbole
Just one to inquire what a farmer’s prices are.
And one did stop, but only to plow up grass
In using the yard to back and turn around;
And another to ask the way to where it was bound;
And another to ask could they sell it a gallon of gas Alliteration
They couldn’t (this crossly); they had none, didn’t it see? Rhetorical Q
No, in country money, the country scale of gain, Repetition
The requisite lift of spirit has never been found,
Or so the voice of the country seems to complain, Personification
I can’t help owning the great relief it would be
To put these people at one stroke out of their pain. Euphemism
And then next day as I come back into the sane,
I wonder how I should like you to come to me
And offer to put me gently out of my pain.
 6. Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers
Adrienne Rich

Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,

Bright topaz denizens of a world of green. Metaphor
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty. Personification

Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool

Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band Hyperbole
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand. Personification

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie Transferred epithet
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid. Alliteration
Std XI Figures of Speech

A PHOTOGRAPH
Shirley Toulson

The Cardboard shows me how it was Personification

When the two girl cousins went paddling,
Each one holding one of my mother's hands, Repetition, Alliteration
And she the big girl-some twelve years or so.
All three stood still to smile through their hair Alliteration
At the uncle with the camera. A sweet face,
My Mother's, that was before I was born. Inversion, Alliteration
And the sea, which appears to have changed less,
Washed their terribly transient feet.

Some twenty-thirty-years later

She'd laugh at the snapshot, "See Betty
And Dolly." she'd say, "and look how they
Dressed us for the beach." The sea holiday
Was her past, mine is her laughter. Both wry
With the laboured ease of loss. Oxymoron

Now she's been dead nearly as many years

As that girl lived. And of this circumstance
There is nothing to say at all.
Its silence silences. Alliteration, Personification
 THE LABURNUM TOP
Ted Hughes

The Laburnum top is silent, quite still Personification

In the afternoon yellow September sunlight, Alliteration
A few leaves yellowing, all its seeds fallen.

Till the goldfinch comes, with a twitching chirrup Onomatopoeia

A suddenness, a startlement, at a branch end.
Then sleek as a lizard, and alert, and abrupt, Simile
She enters the thickness, and a machine starts up Metaphor
Of chitterings, and a tremor of wings, and trillings— Onomatopoeia
The whole tree trembles and thrills. Alliteration
It is the engine of her family. Metaphor
She stokes it full, then flirts out to a branch-end
Showing her barred face identity mask Metaphor

Then with eerie delicate whistle-chirrup whisperings Onomatopoeia

She launches away, towards the infinite

And the laburnum subsides to empty.

 The Voice of the Rain
Walt Whitman

And who art thou?said I to the soft-falling shower, Apostrophe, Inversion

Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:

I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain, Metaphor, Personification

Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea, Inversion, Hyperbole,
Personification
Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form’d, altogether changed, and yet the same, Personification
I descend to lave the droughts, atomies, dust-layers of the globe, Personification

And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn; Personification

And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin, Antithesis, Personification

And make pure and beautify it; Personification

(For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfilment,wandering

Reck’d or unreck’d, duly with love returns.) Antithesis, Inversion

***Please note –

1. Lines 3-9 (I am the poem…and beautify it). Each line is a Personification as the rain is
speaking.

2. Last 2 lines (For song…love returns) – Inversion.

 CHILDHOOD
Markus Natten

When did my childhood go? Rhetorical Q,

Was it the day I ceased to be eleven,
Was it the time I realised that Hell and Heaven, Alliteration, Antithesis
Could not be found in Geography,
And therefore could not be,
Was that the day!

When did my childhood go? Rhetorical Q

Was it the time I realised that adults were not all they seemed to be,
They talked of love and preached of love, Repetition
But did not act so lovingly,
Was that the day!

When did my childhood go? Rhetorical Q

Was it when I found my mind was really mine, Alliteration
To use whichever way I choose,
Producing thoughts that were not those of other people
But my own, and mine alone
Was that the day!

Where did my childhood go? Rhetorical Q

It went to some forgotten place, Personification
That’s hidden in an infant’s face,
That’s all I know
 FATHER TO SON
Elizabeth Jennings
I do not understand this child
Though we have lived together now
In the same house for years. I know
Nothing of him, so try to build
Up a relationship from how
He was when small. Yet have I killed

The seed I spent or sown it where

The land is his and none of mine?
We speak like strangers, there’s no sign Simile
Of understanding in the air.
This child is built to my design
Yet what he loves I cannot share. Inversion

Silence surrounds us. I would have Alliteration

Him prodigal, returning to
His father’s house, the home he knew,
Rather than see him make and move Alliteration
His world. I would forgive him too,
Shaping from sorrow a new love. Inversion

Father and son, we both must live

On the same globe and the same land, Repetition
He speaks: I cannot understand
Myself, why anger grows from grief.
We each put out an empty hand,
Longing for something to forgive.
 THE DIFFERENT NORMALS
Frederika Menezes

Oh, when you see me

What do you see…Apostrophe
A broken winged
Featherless bird Metaphor
Trapped where it is? Rhetorical Q (entire stanza)

And what crosses

Your mind
When you hear my
Unsteady voice
Speak…
Do you try to understand
My say
Or simply shake your head
Waving it away? Apostrophe, Rhetorical Q (entire stanza)

When I cross your path

Unseeing
Uncomprehending
Hard of hearing… Alliteration
What is your reaction then
Is it pity or indifference? Rhetorical Q, Apostrophe
 And last but not the least
When you read
These lines Apostrophe
Do you think to yourself and say
“Oh, this cannot be
From a hand
That’s unsteady,
From a mind belonging
To one of those
Who aren’t ‘ Normal’ like me !”

If that is so
You know nothing of
What you need
To know
About the different normals Oxymoron
That make up the world…!

Please note-
 In Std XI we will be teaching all the figures of speech based on the list prepared
so that students learn to appreciate and gain a deeper understanding of poetry. So
in some lines, even three figures of speech have been identified unlike in Std XII
where we are restricting ourselves to only one figure of speech in a line.