Senior English Literary Devices: Key Terms and Examples

Alliteration

Repetition of initial consonant sounds; e.g., 'scuttling across the floors of silent seas' from the poem 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock' by T.S. Eliot.

Allusion

Indirect or passing reference to a person, place, or event; can be biblical, mythological, historical, literary, artistic, etc.; e.g., 'See what a grade was seated on this brow, Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove himself, An eye like Mars' to threaten and command...' from William Shakespeare's play Hamlet.

Apostrophe

The addressing of words to an absent person as if he or she were not present or to a thing or ideas as if it could understand and appreciate the words; e.g., 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star / How I wonder what you are' from 'The Star' by Ann Taylor and Jane Taylor.

Assonance

Repetition of similar or identical vowel sounds in a line or a series of lines in a poem; e.g., 'Hear the mellow wedding bells, Golden bells!' from Edgar Allen Poe's poem 'The Bells.'

Atmosphere

The general feeling of a poem; described with an adjective (e.g., happy, sad, eerie, nostalgic, etc.).

Ballad

A poem that tells a story (narrative), often in a straightforward and dramatic manner and often about such universal themes as love, honour, and courage; e.g., 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Ballad Stanza

Generally found as a quatrain, or four-line stanza, within a ballad.

Blank Verse

Lines in poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter; e.g., 'with some uncertain notice, as might seem / of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods' from the poem 'Tintern Abbey' by William Wordsworth.

Cacophony

The use of harsh or unmusical sounds, like truncheon and cataract.

Chorus

A part of a poem that is repeated.

Consonance

Repetition of similar consonant sounds in a group of words; e.g., 'Now the water's low. The weeds exceed me' from Theodore Roethke's poem 'Praise to the End.'

Couplet

Two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme; e.g., 'then brook abridgment, and your eyes advance / after your thoughts, straight back to France' from King Henry V, a play by William Shakespeare.

Dissonance

Harsh sounding, unusual, or impolite words used to create a disturbing effect or to disrupt the flow of words; e.g., 'thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides' from 'To a Locomotive in Winter,' a song by Walt Whitman.

Elegy

A poem of mourning, usually over the death of an individual; e.g., 'A Grammarian's Funeral' by Robert Browning and 'Elegy' by Dylan Thomas.

Enjambment

The continuation of a sentence or phrase from one line of poetry to the next; a ____ line typically lacks punctuation at its line break.

Epic

A long poem, often about a heroic character; e.g., 'Beowulf' and 'Odyssey' by Homer.

Euphemism

The use of a mild or indirect expression instead of one that is harsh or unpleasantly direct

Euphony

Sounds pleasing to the ear; e.g., John Keats employs euphony in his poem 'To Autumn.'

Extended Metaphor

A metaphor that is extended throughout most of or all of a poem; e.g., Shakespeare's 'Sonnet 18' is an example.

Free Verse

A type of poem with no discernible or set rhythm, rhyme, or rules; e.g., 'Apocalypse' by D. J. Enright.

Hyperbole

A figure of speech that uses deliberate exaggeration for effect; e.g., 'An hundred years should go to praise / Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze' from Andrew Marvel's poem 'To His Coy Mistress.'

Image

A word or series of words that refers to a sensory experience.

Imagery

Words or phrases that create pictures or images in the reader's mind; e.g., 'the apparition of these faces in the crowd / petals on a wet, black bough' from 'In a Station of the Metro' by Ezra Pound.

Irony

When the actual meaning is the opposite of the stated meaning; e.g., W. H. Auden's 'The Unknown Citizen' is an elegy celebrating the life of a citizen, yet the state does not know the citizen at all.

Juxtaposition

The deliberate contrast of elements in a poem for effect.

Lyric

Short poem that expresses the private thoughts and emotions of the poet; e.g., sonnets, odes, and elegies.

Metaphor

A figure of speech that makes a comparison between two fundamentally dissimilar things.

Metonymy

Figure of speech that replaces the name of one thing with the name of something closely associated with it.

Metre

A generally regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry.

Metrical Poetry

Poetry written in regular, repeating rhythms; rhymes are also regular and are often found at the end of lines.

Mood

The atmosphere of a poem; the way the poet orders the elements of the poem to create a dominant emotion or pattern of emotions for the reader.

Motif

A recurring theme, idea, incident, image, symbol, etc. found in poems.

Narrative

A poem that tells a story.

Octave

An eight-line poem or stanza; can also refer to the first eight lines in an Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet.

Ode

A poem expressing lofty emotion; often celebrating an event or addressed to nature, a person, place, or thing.

Onomatopoeia

Words that imitate the sounds they refer to, such as buzz, bang, or hiss.

Oxymoron

A combination of two contradictory terms, usually expressed as a paradox.

Paradox

A statement in which there is an apparent contradiction which is actually true.

Parallelism

Making two or more lines of poetry similar in form to create a pattern and suggest corresponding meaning between them.

Pastoral

A type of poem that deals in an idealized way with shepherds and rustic lives.

Personification

Attributing human qualities to inanimate objects.

Pun

A humorous expression that depends on a double meaning, either between different senses of the same word or between two similar sounding words.

Quatrain

A stanza of four lines, usually with alternating rhymes.

Refrain

A word, line, phrase, or group of lines repeated regularly throughout the poem, usually at the end of each stanza.

Repetition

The act of repeating something that has already been written; used for emphasis.

Rhyme

The repetition of sounds in two or more words or phrases that appear closely to one another in a poem.

Rhyme Scheme

The pattern of rhyme in a poem.

Sarcasm

The use of irony to mock or convey contempt.

Satire

A literary form of writing which uses humour to provoke change (usually socio-political).

Sestet

A six line poem or stanza; can also refer to the last six lines in an Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet.

Simile

A comparison between two things using like, as, or than.

Sonnet

A lyric poem of fourteen lines in iambic pentameter.

Stanza

A segment within the formal pattern of a poem, can consist of any groupings of numbers of lines.

Style

A poet's characteristic way of writing determined by their choice of words, the arrangement of words in lines, and the relationship between the lines.

Synecdoche

When part of something is used to represent the whole.

Symbol

Anything that stands for or represents something else other than itself.

Symbolism

The use of symbols to represent ideas and create meaning in poems.

Theme

A general idea or insight about life in general the poet wishes to express in a poem.

Tone

A particular way of speaking or writing, describing the general feeling of a piece of work.

Understatement

The presentation of something as being smaller, less good, or of less importance than it really is.

Wit

The capacity for inventive thought and quick, keen understanding, often with the intent of producing humorous responses.

Connotation

The implied meaning of a word.

Denotation

The literal dictionary definition of a word.