ENG 102 | ENG 102 Handouts

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

IMAGE - representation in words of sense experience; words which appeal to one or more of the senses; a visual image may be called a mental picture.

• "the goat-footed balloonMan whistles" -e. e. cummings

  "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood" -Frost

METAPHOR - an implied comparison of two unlike things; a direct verbal equation of two or more things that may at first seem unlike

• "Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we shall die"
• "Life the hound
  Equivocal" -Robert Francis
• "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
  And then is heard no more. . ." -Shakespeare

SIMILE - comparison of two unlike things using "like" with nouns and "as" with clauses

• "Like to the falling of a star, . . . . Even such is man," -Henry King

SYMBOL - a specific idea or object that may stand for ideas, values, persons or ways of life; something that means more than what it is

• "The Road Not Taken"
• "The Tyger"

PERSONIFICATION - giving human characteristics to an animal, object, or concept (something nonhuman); a subtype of metaphor in which the figurative term is always a human being

• "Because I could not stop for Death--
  He kindly stopped for me--"

APOSTROPHE - addressing someone absent or something nonhuman as if it were alive or present and could respond

• "Tyger, Tyger, burning bright" -Blake

PARADOX - an apparent contradiction which is actually true

• "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise."

OVERSTATEMENT or HYPERBOLE - exaggeration used to achieve emphasis

• "All night I made my bed to swim; with my tears I dissolved my couch." -Psalms 6:6
• "I shall be telling this with a sigh
• Somewhere ages and ages hence." -Frost

UNDERSTATEMENT - saying less than what is true; the deliberate undervaluing of a thing to create emphasi (may exist in what one says or in how one says it)

• "For destruction ice is also great and would suffice" -Frost

VERBAL IRONY - saying the opposite of what is meant

• "My Papa's Waltz" -Roethke
• "Was he free? Was he happy" The question is absurd." -Auden, "The Unknown Citizen"

IMAGE -means only what it is

METAPHOR - means other than what it is

SYMBOL - means what it is and something more, too

sbooth@qcc.mass.edu