Figurative Language (cont.)

Metonymy and Synecdoche: Two common types of metaphor:

1. Metonymy: the use of something closely related for the

thing actually meant.

Ex: In “Out, Out--,” Robert Frost uses metonymy when he describes an injured boy holding up his cut hand “as if to keep / The life from spilling . . . .” Literally he means to keep the blood from spilling.

2. Synecdoche: the whole is replaced by the part.

Ex: Shakespeare uses synecdoche when he says that the cuckoo’s song is unpleasing to a “married ear,” for he really means a married man.

Personification: A figure of speech in which human attributes

are given to an animal, an object, or a concept.

Ex: When Keats describes autumn as a harvester “sitting careless on a granary floor” or “on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,” he is personifying a season. Also, in the Dickinson poem mentioned earlier, Dickinson describes frost as a “blond assassin.” As a result, she is personifying frost.

Apostrophe: An address to a person or thing not literally

listening.

“Western Wind”

Western Wind, when wilt thou blow,

The small rain down can rain?

Christ! if my love were in my arms,

And I in my bed again!

-----Anonymous (c. 1500)

Overstatement(Hyperbole): Statement containing exaggeration.

Ex: Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”: “An hundred years should go to praise / Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze, / Two hundred to adore each breast, / But thirty thousand to the rest” (13-16).

Understatement: Implying more than is said.

Ex: Frost’s “Birches”: One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”—The end of the poem suggests that swinging on a birch tree is one of the most satisfying activities in the world.