This document discusses various figures of speech and metaphorical language techniques used in poetry to deepen meaning and provide fresh perspectives. It provides examples of different figures of speech like simile, metaphor, paradox, personification, and analyzes poems that utilize these techniques to explore ideas about humanity, relationships, and personal experiences. Key figures of speech are defined and poems are analyzed to understand how specific metaphors and rhetorical devices shape meaning.

1. Figures of Speech, or Metaphorical
Language: A Source of Depth and
Range in Poetry

2. • Figures of speech, metaphorical language,
figurative language, figurative devise, and
rhetorical figures are terms describing
organized patterns of comparison that
deepen, broaden, extend, illuminate, and
emphasis meaning.
• Gives us a fresh and original way of thinking,
feeling, and understanding.

3. Metaphor
• You are the sunshine of my life
• All the world’s a stage

4. Similie
• Ogres are like onions

5. • Paradox-contradictory and truthful
• Anaphora-repetition of the same word or phrase
• Personification
• Synecdoche- all hands aboard
• Metonymy-Hollywood
• Paronomasia-wordplay stemming from the fact that
words with different meanings have similar sounds but
different meanings.
• Synesthesia-personification of emotions
• Overstatement
• Understatement (Litote)
Metaphorical Language Terms

6. • Sic Vita (Such is Life)
– Henry King
• Like to the falling of a star,
Or as the flights of eagles are,
Or like the fresh spring's gaudy
hue,
Or silver drops of morning dew,
Or like a wind that chafes the
flood,
Or bubbles which on water
stood:
Even such is man, whose
borrowed light
Is straight called in, and paid to
night.
The wind blows out, the bubble
dies;
The spring entombed in autumn
lies;
The dew dries up, the star is
shot;
The flight is past, and man
forgot.
• 1. how many similes are in the
poem? What do all these similis
have in common?
• 2. What point does this poem
make about humanity? In what
ways do the similis in the poem
help explore these ideas and
bring them to life?

7. • “Metaphors” by Sylvia Plath
• I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat
purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting
off.
• 1. What evidence can you find in the
poem that the speaker is a woman?
• 2. The speaker calls herself a riddle in
nine syllables. What is the answer to
the riddle? Why nine syllables? In
what sense is the poem also a riddle?
How are the answers to both riddles
related?
• 3. Which of the metaphors do you
find amusing, s hocking, demeaning?
What do these suggest about the
speaker’s attitude toward herself?
• 4. What two meanings are suggested
by the stage metaphor? Why is the
train metaphor appropriate to the
speaker’s condition and the results of
that condition?

8. • Looking at Each Other
• By Muriel Rukeyser
•
• Yes, we were looking at each other
Yes, we knew each other very well
Yes, we had made love with each other many
times
Yes, we had heard music together
Yes, we had gone to the sea together
Yes, we had cooked and eaten together
Yes, we had laughed often day and night
Yes, we fought violence and knew violence
Yes, we hated the inner and outer
oppression
Yes, that day we were looking at each other
Yes, we saw the sunlight pouring down
Yes, the corner of the table was between us
Yes, our eyes saw each other’s eyes
Yes, our mouths saw each other’s mouths
Yes, our breasts saw each other’s breasts
Yes, our bodies entire saw each other
Yes, it was beginning in each
Yes, it threw waves across our lives
Yes, the pulses were becoming very strong
Yes, the beating became very delicate
Yes, the calling the arousal
Yes, the arriving the coming
Yes, there it was for both entire
Yes, we were looking at each other
• 1. What is the dramatic situation of the
poem? What sort of listener is the speaker
addressing?
• Describe the rhetorical device used here?
How many different words are being
repeated?
• 3. What is the effect of the repetitions?
What is their relationship to the emotions
and experiences that the speaker is
describing?