Figurative Language: Poetic Device Test

The act of addressing someone or something that is absent or dead as if it were present and alive, as in John Keats’s “Bright Star”: “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art.”

• symbolism
• apostrophe
• metonymy
• personification

A metaphor that gets drawn out or extended through multiple comparisons. In the play As You Like It, William Shakespeare uses this when he not only compares the world to a “stage” but proceeds to compare people to actors who perform a variety of “parts” upon that stage: “All the world’s a stage, / and all the men and women merely players. / They have their exits and their entrances, / And one man in his time plays many parts.”

• simile
• metaphor
• extended metaphor
• mixed metaphor

A contradiction that is somehow true. An example from Tim O’ Brien’s novel is The Things They Carried: “I hated him for making me stop hating him.”

• paradox
• oxymoron
• understatement
• metonymy

A stanza consisting of two lines.

• tercet
• sestet
• octave
• couplet

The repetition of vowel sounds in the middle of two or more words in proximity to one another, as in “mad as a hatter.”

• consonance
• assonance
• alliteration
• onomatopoeia

Repetition of the same syntactic structure. Charles Churchill uses this in the second of these lines: “Virtue, ever in your sight, / Shall be your guide by day, your guard by night.”

• chiasmus
• hyperbaton
• anaphora
• parallelism

The use of vivid language to represent a sensory experience.

• auditory image
• imagery
• synesthesia
• visual image

Reference to a person, place, or idea using the word for a part of the whole, as when an automobile is represented by the word wheels, or when manual laborers are called hired hands.

• metonymy
• synecdoche
• symbolism
• apostrophe

A figure of speech in which one says less than one means. For example, Macbeth, having been nearly hysterical after killing King Duncan, tells Lenox, “’Twas a rough night.”

• understatement
• hyberbole
• synecdoche
• personification

Octave is a stanza consisting of ________ lines.

• four
• eight
• two
• six