Zoned Out on Poetry #3

A poem is a piece of writing in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by particular attention to language. The words are chosen for their sensory or evocative beauty. Poets also often use figurative language to create vivid pictures and new insights. Here are four more common devices of such figurative language.

a)     Simile – a comparison of two unlike things using words such as “like” or “as” to suggest the similarity. For example in this sentence “Jack runs like the wind” Jack and the wind are compared in terms of their speed.

b)    Metaphor – points out the resemblance between two unlike things by identifying the two things as one; one thing is not like the other it is the other. For example in this sentence “Jack is a beast” Jack takes on all the characteristics of a beast – barbaric, vicious, even ugly.

Can you identify the simile and metaphor in William Wordsworth’s Daffodils?

I wandered lonely as a cloud
  That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
  A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

c)     Personification – giving human qualities to something nonhuman. For example in this sentence “The sun climbed up the sky” the sun is humanised in its movement. 

In Sylvia Plath’s poem Mirror, the mirror is personified as a thinking, functioning being that tells users the truth about themselves.

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful,
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

d)     Alliteration is one of the devices used by poets to lend greater effect to the poem through aural means. Alliteration is the repetition of the initial consonant sounds in multiple words. Here is a humorous children’s poem called The Gnome, The Gnat, & The Gnu by Shel Silverstein with his play of alliteration.

I saw an ol’ gnome
Take a gknock at a gnat
Who was gnibbling the gnose of his gnu.
I said, “Gnasty gnome,
Gnow, stop doing that.
That gnat aint done gnothing to you.”
He gnodded his gnarled ol’ head and said,
“’Til gnow I gnever gnew
That gknocking a gnat
In the gnoodle like that
Was gnot a gnice thing to do.”