Literary Devices and Figures of Speech

Metaphor

A metaphor establishes a similarity between two terms based on a shared characteristic or quality. It's a way of talking about something in two ways. In poetic metaphors, this characteristic is emphasized to say the same thing but more beautifully.

Examples of Metaphors:

• Your eyes are two stars (meaning your eyes are bright or illuminated).
• Your hair is golden (blonde hair).

Example of a Text Full of Metaphors:

His eyes, like rivers after the rain, expressed not only sadness, but vengeance also, like lava poured from the tip of an erupting volcano. Those tears, breaking like glass as they touched the ground, were not worth it. It was from anger and the rage of impotence, the same powerlessness a child feels when an adult steals their candy, the same punishment, as drunk as a carrion bird on a cadaver. He had left home, and when we grow up...

Hyperbole

Hyperbole is a trope that involves making a very big exaggeration, increasing or decreasing the truth of what is spoken, so that the message is received. It attaches more importance to the action itself and not the quality of that action.

Onomatopoeia

In linguistics, onomatopoeia is the use of a word, or sometimes a group of words, whose pronunciation imitates the sound of what it describes. Typical examples of onomatopoeia are "boom," "bam," "click," or "crack." Some onomatopoeia are used to describe visual figures instead of sounds, such as "zigzag."

Acrostic

An acrostic (from Greek Akros: extreme, stikhos: line or verse) is a poetic composition in which the initial, middle, or end letters of each line, read vertically, form a word or a phrase. By extension, the word or phrase formed by those letters is also called an acrostic.

Si clean well discern my plea,
Which straightens person from this extreme
Con what is involved, who runs his oars:
Amor pleasant or dislike elusive
Buscad to aquesta well I write,
Or read her argument of principle.
Leedl and see that although sweet story
And the diamonds, which shows you out of captivity.

Antithesis

Antithesis involves two words, concepts, ideas, or sentences that are mutually contradictory opposites. This highlights the opposition or contradiction. An antithesis can create a rebuttal and is usually preceded by the word "but."

Alliteration

Alliteration is a structural device characterized by the repetition of initial consonants at the beginning of two consecutive or slightly separated words. Put another way, it is the repetition of consonant sounds (phonemes) at the beginning of words or syllables.

Polysyndeton

Polysyndeton (from Greek poly "a lot," syn "with," and dein "tie") is a rhetorical figure that involves the use of more conjunctions than necessary in normal language use, linking words, phrases, or sentences. Its function is to accelerate or speed up reading, for example, in an enumeration. An example from Zorrilla is "noise with the hoarse storm rolling."

Asyndeton

Asyndeton is a literary device that consists of omitting conjunctions. It is often used to give flexibility to the text and designates the removal of coordination marks and, therefore, a union between terms that would normally take them.

Anaphora

Anaphora (from Latin Greek anaphora and this ἀναφορά "promotion, the above reference") is a special case of a figure of speech, a kind of alliteration, which consists of repeating the first words of a verse. It is a type of epanadiplosis.

Examples:

• Early death raised the flight,
• Early Morning Morning,
• Early're rolling on the floor.

• No death forgive love,
• not forgive careless life,
• earth do not forgive or to nothing.