Figures of Speech

Identify and Explain Figures of speech

1.Simile
Straight comparison between two different things by using words like ‘as’, ‘as…..as’, ‘so….as,’ ‘like’.
i). They’re pretty like you.
Explanation: In the poem ‘they’ stand for flowers and ‘you’ stand for mother. So flowers are clearly compared with mother.
ii). settle like sterile clouds
iii). They shiver like December nights
iv). trembling like waves
v). They whisper like drizzles
vi). But the huge banyan tree stood like a problem.
vii).She had such a wonderful face
just like a golden flower faded
2. Metaphor
Def: An implied comparison between two different things that actually have something important in common. Two different things are supposed to be one.
Examples:
1.You are a beacon-light for people far and wide.
Explanation : (‘You’ in this line is implicitly compared with ‘beacon-light’)
2. Old women once
were continents
3. With the fleeting passage of a runner or shy hotel for travelers. Explanation: ‘fleeting passage’ here means life, runner compared with a middle class man, hotel compared with earth travelers compared with middle class people.
4. Peace is a woman
3. Antithesis
Contrasting ideas or words are placed close to each other in balanced phrases.
Examples:
1. If you have the will to live and courage to die.
Explanation : The opposite words ‘to live’ and ‘to die’ are juxtaposed.
2. How we treat our loved ones, young and old.
3. All dawns pass leaving them in the dark.
4. Only thinking in the present, not learning from the past.
5.One by one the structures were demolished

Only our own house remained and the trees
4. Metonymy
A word is used to represent a class or category of things.
Examples:
Not gold but only men can make
A pepole great and strong
5. Hyperbole
An extravagant statement; the use of exaggerated terms for the purpose of emphasis or heightened effect.
1. A thousand candles then lit in her starry eyes.
2. We used to think seven generations ahead

6. Paradox
A statement that appears contradictory, absurd or unbelievable but it may be true.
Examples: 1. I celebrate the virtues and vices. Explanation: Celebration of vices seems absurd.
7. Repetition
A word is repeated pleasingly in a line.
Examples:
1.Fifty men with axes chopped and chopped
2."Wake up, little one, wake up,"
3.untamed beasts roam far, far from town

8. Personification
A figure of speech in which an inanimate object or abstraction is endowed with human qualities or abilities.
1. They do not fear death, they died long ago. Explanation : "death" is treated like human being.
2. .....the valley play hide and seek
3., the wind caressing our crown
9. Pun
A play on words, sometimes on different senses of the same word and sometimes on the similar sense or sound of different words.
10. Transferred Epithet
A figure of speech in which an adjective is transferred from one noun to another. Examples 1. shy hotel for travelers Explanation : An adjective ‘shy’ is transferred from the travelers to a hotel.
11.Onomatopoeia
The use of words that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to.
1.They whisper like drizzles
12. Alliteration
The repetition of an initial consonant sound
13. Climax
Ideas, words are arranged in ascending order
1.They had deep woods in them. Lakes, mountains, volcanoes even raging gulfs.
14. Anticlimax
Ideas, words are arranged in descending order
1.When the earth was in heat, they melted, shrank, leaving only their maps.
15 Onamatopoea
Words represent sound.
1.They whisper like drizzles
2. raging gulfs.
16. Inversion
The words are not arranged in prose order.
1. common courtesy you use