Figurative Language. . . .”C”onnotation

• anaphora chiasmus• hyperbole enjambment• end-stop asyndeton• in medias res litote

“The wind stood up and gave a shout.He whistled on his fingers and

Kicked the withered leaves about”(James Stephens, The Wind)

PERSONIFICATION. . . A figure of speech in which an inanimate object or abstraction is given human qualities or abilities.

UNDERSTATEMENT . . . A figure of speech in which a writer or a speaker deliberately makes a situation seem less important or serious than it is.

"It's just a flesh wound."

(Black Knight, after having both of his arms cut off, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail)

"I have to have this operation… It isn't very serious. I have this tiny little tumor on the brain.“

(Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The Rye, by J. D. Salinger)

SIMILE. . . A figure of speech in which two fundamentally unlike things are explicitly compared, usually in a phrase introduced by like or as.

"Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep."

(Carl Sandburg)

"She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat."(James Joyce, "The Boarding House")

Now it is your turn. . . . Write a poem that contains at least eight lines and uses two of the devices from above. . . Start with these lines:

The sun that brief December dayRose cheerless over hills of gray.

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down! Long has it waved on high.

anaphoraRepetition of the same word or phrase at the start of successive phrases clauses or sentences.

"Hope – hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!"

(Barack Obama, "The Audacity of Hope," July 27, 2004)

"We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."

(Winston Churchill, speech to the House of Commons, June 4, 1940)

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

(Rick Blaine in Casablanca)

"I flee who chases me, and chase who flees me."(Ovid)

"Fair is foul, and foul is fair."(William Shakespeare, Macbeth Act 1, Scene 1)

"Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."

(Samuel Johnson)

"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order."(Alfred North Whitehead)"The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults."

(Peter De Vries)

"You can take it out of the country, but you can't take the country out of it."

(slogan for Salem cigarettes)

chiasmusA verbal pattern (a type of antithesis in which the second half of an expression is balanced against the first with the parts reversed.

: Alliteration. . . "You'll never put a better bit of butter on your knife."(advertising slogan for Country Life butter)

"Good men are gruff and grumpy, cranky, crabbed, and cross."(Clement Freud)

"A moist young moon hung above the mist of a neighboring meadow."(Vladimir Nabokov, Conclusive Evidence, 1951)

"Guinness is good for you."(advertising slogan)

"The soul selects her own society."(Emily Dickinson)

“Apostrophe”. . . .speaking directly to/ addressing an inanimate object or an idea as if it were a person. . . .

“O death, where is thy sting; O grave, where is thy victory?

"Oh! Stars and clouds and winds, ye are all about to mock me; if ye really pity me, crush sensation and memory; let me become as nought; but if not, depart, depart, and leave me in darkness."

(Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818)

"Death be not proud, though some have called theeMighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,

Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.(John Donne, "Death be not proud")

 O moonlight deep and tender, A year and more agone,

Your mist of golden splendor Round my betrothal shone! 

O elm-leaves dark and dewy, The very same ye seem,

The low wind trembles through ye, Ye murmur in my dream! 

O river, dim with distance, Flow thus forever by,

A part of my existence Within your heart doth lie!

 O stars, ye saw our meeting, Two beings and one soul,

Two hearts so madly beating To mingle and be whole! 

O happy night, deliver Her kisses back to me,

Or keep them all, and give her A blisslul dream of me!

Song James Russell Lowell

Find at least five examples of figurative language. . . “connotation”

Litote

a figure of speech that emphasizes its subject by conscious understatement. For example, the understated “not bad” as a comment about something especially well done.

George Orwell wrote “Last week I saw a woman flayed and you would hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse,”

Asyndeton—a style in which conjunctions are omitted, usually producing a fast-paced, more rapid prose.

For example, Caesar’s famous lines, “I came, I saw, I conquered,” is asyndeton.

All photos in this template courtesy

ofBill Staples