Course: English Literature (First Year)

Lesson One: An Introduction to Poetic Literary Devices

Semester: One
Lecturer: Dr Nihad LAOUAR

An Introduction to Poetic Literary Devices

Like prose, poems are written to convey a certain message. The meaning of these messages is
portrayed through poetic devices that are summarized below:

1. Speaker: The speaker is the voice of the poem. It is important to note that the speaker is not always
the poet himself/herself. When the poet creates a speaker other than himself/herself to narrate the
poem, the speaker in this case is referred to as a persona.

2. Audience: an audience is the reader that the poem targets. The choice of the audience depends on
the thematic concerns of the poem. Determining the audience of a poem helps readers understand
its significance better. In this sense, the speaker can address:

• themselves (this is referred to as dramatic monologue)

• another character in a poem,
• an absent or dead character (this is referred to as apostrophe)
• readers in general
3. Form: the form of a poem is how the poem is structured, meaning the pattern of the poem.
Traditional poetry has to stick to a specific set of rules about the form such as length, rhythm and
rhyme. There are two basic forms of poetry: stichic poetry and strophic poetry.

• Stichic poetry is the kind of poetry that is composed as a continuous sequence of verse of
the same length with no breaks.

• Strophic poetry is the kind of poetry in which lines are grouped together. These groups of
lines are called stanzas which are separated by breaks unlike stichic poetry that is written
in continuous lines.

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 • Note: Stanzas can come in different forms according to the number of lines that a stanza
contains. For example, a stanza that has:
Two line is called couplet
Three lines is called triplet
Four lines is called quatrain
Six lines is called sestet
Seven lines is called septet
Eight lines is called octave

4. Theme: themes in poetry are grouped together under specific poetic forms. These forms are: Ode,
elegy, ballad, pastoral, lyric, epic and love poems. Each of these forms of poetry expresses certain
themes. For example,

• Ode: is a form of poetry that is written to express themes about glorifying and praising an
individual, an idea or an object.
• Elegy: is a poetic form that articulates themes about sadness, grief or loss of a loved one.
In others words, elegies are often written to mourn the dead.
• Ballad: ballad is a form of narrative verse and it is considered either poetic or musical.
Originally, ballads used to be sung. They often express themes about tragic romance,
supernatural or fantastic stories etc.
• Pastoral: poems that draw on rural setting; they are often descriptive of utopian pastoral
life (nature).
• Lyric: lyric poems are subjective poems that express powerful feelings.
• Epic: this is a lengthy narrative poem that focuses on adventurous and heroic stories.
• Love poem: a poem that is filled with expressions of joy, despair, romance or unrequited
love.

5. Tone and Mood: the tone of a poem refers to the feeling that a poet displays towards a given
subject. The mood on the other hand indicates the prevailing atmosphere of the poem. These two
literary devices are related; in that the tone of the speaker establishes the mood of the poem.

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Figures of Speech: Figures of speech function as poetic devices. They are words or phrases used in
their figurative form to create an effect.

1.Imagery: because poetry often deals with deep human emotions, the poet necessitates certain vivid
and descriptive words that carry strong visual and sensory effects. So, imagery is the use of a vivid
language to generate ideas and evoke certain mental images that are not only visual but also
sensational. This also means that the aim of an image in poetry is to evoke sensory experience and
emotional response from the reader. Below are some examples of images that tend to evoke the five
senses:

• Sight: Smoke mysteriously puffed out from the clown’s ears.

• Sound: Tom placed his ear tightly against the wall; he could hear a faint but distinct thump
thump thump.
• Touch: The burlap wall covering scraped against the little boy’s cheek.
• Taste: A salty tear ran across onto her lips.
• Smell: Cinnamon! That’s what wafted into his nostrils.

2. Simile is used to describe something by comparing it to something else, using “like” and “as”
For example: And in the evening lamps would shine,
Yellow as honey, red as wine,
In the above verses taken from Walter De La Mare’s poem Tartary, the poet uses simile to compare
yellow to honey and red to wine.
3. Metaphor is a word or a phrase used to describe something as if it were something else. For
example: "A wave of terror washed over him." Terror cannot be a wave and the word “wave” is used
here to describe the feeling and evoke vivid sensations in the reader.

4.Alliteration: this is a literary technique where there is an occurrence of repetition of usually initial
consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words or syllables. See the example below:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,--
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping.
The Raven by Edgar Allen
Poe
5.Assonance is a literary device in which the repetition of similar vowel sound takes place in two or
more neighboring words in a line of a poem. See the example below:

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 Who knows why the cold wind blows

Or where it goes, or what it knows.

It only flows in passionate throes

Until it finally slows and settles in repose

The Cold Wind Blows by Kelly Roper

6.Consonance: refers to repetition of consonant sounds within a sequence of words in close

proximity to each other.

See the example below:

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
Robert Frost’s Out-Out

7.Refrain: is the repetition of one or more phrases or lines at intervals in a poem, usually at the
end of a stanza. See the example below:

It is magical, yes, this life that I live

Each day it gives something
Something it gives each day.
It is magical, absolutely magical the life that I live.

8.Personification: personification is a poetic device that entails the projection of human

characteristics into inanimate objects in order to create powerful image. For example:
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.
William Wordsworth, Daffodils
As can be seen in the last line of this stanza, the daffodils are personified in that they are given
a human characteristic that of “dancing”

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9.Enjambment: is the continuation of the logic sense. This means to run the lines of a poem from
one to the next without using any form of punctuation with the purpose of continuing the logic
sense of an idea.
Example:
The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept
And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may
Lay think upon the bed on which I lay

10.Hyperbole: occurs when there is an outrageous exaggeration of statements to produce an effect

or emphasis. For example: He weighs a ton.
Or, Her smile is as bright as the sun

11.Rhyme: Rhyme is the use of corresponding sounds in lines of writing. This can occur at the
end of lines or in the middle. The most commonly resigned type of rhyme is full-end rhymes.
These appear at the end of lines and rhyme perfectly with one another. It is usually used when the
writer wants to make their poetry sound more musical than it already does.
*The structure of end words of a verse is called rhyme scheme. The rhyme scheme is the pattern
of sounds that repeats at the end of a line. It can change line by line. So, the first sound is
represented as a, the following sound is represented as b, the next sound is represented as c and so
on. When the first sound is repeated in another line, it is also represented as a and so on. See the
example below:
I wandered lonely as a cloud. a
That floats on high o'er vales and hills, b
When all at once I saw a crowd, a
A host, of golden daffodils; b
Beside the lake, beneath the trees, c
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. c

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Note: Please note that the rhyme can also be internal which is the kind of rhyme that occurs in the
middle of lines of poetry, instead of at the ends of lines. For example:

Standing brave in secret caves

We call to lost kids in the crowd

Lure and save these lonely slaves

Our hearts, are open growing proud

In this example, brave and caves are internal rhymes whereas crowd and proud are external
rhymes.

12.Rhythm: is a pattern of sound movement. In poetry, the rhythm involves different patterns of
stressed and unstressed syllables. When we measure the rhythm of a poem, we need to look for
meters and feet.
Meter: is pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of a poem.
Foot: is a unit of meter consisting of stressed and unstressed syllables and it has different types.
These are listed below:
Types of metrical feet: the standard types of feet in English poetry are iamb, trochee, dactyl,
anapest and spondee. See the table below:

Stressed syllables are labeled with an accent mark: /

Unstressed syllables are labeled with a dash: –

Name Pattern Example

Iamb/Iambic –/ Invite
Trochee/ Trochaic /– Deadline
Dactyl / Dactylic /–– Frequently
Anapest/Anapestic ––/ To the beach
Spondee/ Spondaic // True Blue

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Poets write in different patterns. We describe the pattern by naming the type and number of feet.
Meter is measured by the number of feet in a line. Feet are named by Greek prefix number words
attached to “meter.” For example, a line with five feet is called pentameter. Hence, a line of five
iambs is known as “iambic pentameter” and this the most common metrical form in English
poetry, and the one favored by William Shakespeare. The most common line lengths are listed in
the table below:

Number of Feet Name

One Foot Monometer
Two Feet Dimeter
Three Feet Trimeter
Four Feet Tetrameter
Five Feet Pentameter
Six Feet Hexameter
Seven Feet Heptameter
Eight Feet Octameter