Stylistic Devices

STYLISTIC DEVICES

WEB SITES

http://www.ego4u.com/en/cram-up/writing/style

http://www.jochen-lueders.de/abitur/stylistic_devices.doc

IMAGERY

Simile an explicit comparison between two things which are basically quite different using words such as like or as.
She walks like an angel. / I wandered lonely as a cloud. (Wordsworth)
Metaphor a comparison between two things which arebasically quite different without using like or as. While a simile only says that one thing is like another, a metaphor says that one thing is another. (adj. metaphorical)
All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players ... (Shakespeare)
Personification: a kind of metaphor in which animals, plants, inanimate (leblos) objects or abstract ideas are represented as if they were humanbeings and possessed human qualities.
Justice is blind. Necessity is the mother of invention (Not macht erfinderisch).
Synecdoche: a kind of metaphor in which a part of something is used to signify the whole.
Lend me your ears (= give me your attention)
Symbol (Symbol): something concrete (like a person, object, image, word or event) that stands for something abstract or invisible.
The Crossis the symbol of Christianity. The dove (Taube) symbolizes peace/is symbolic of peace.

SOUND

Alliteration (Alliteration): the repetition of the same consonant sound in neighbouring words, usually at the beginning of words.
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
Assonance: the repetition of internal vowel sounds in neighbouring words that do not end the same.
sweet dreams / fertile- birth
Consonance: the repetition of consonant sounds at the end of neighbouring words which have different vowel sounds.
strength - earth – birth / home - same
Metre: a regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables within a line of a poem.
Iambic metre (Jambus): an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one (– '–):
The way a crow (Krähe) / Shook down on me / The dust of snow /From a hemlock tree (Frost)
Trochaic: a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one ('– –):
Tiger, Tiger, burning bright / In the forest of the night. (William Blake)
Anapestic metre (Anapäst): two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable
(– – '–):
Oh he flies through the air / With the greatest of ease.
Dactylic metre (Daktylus): a stressed syllable followed by two unstressedones ('– – –):
Just for a handful of silver he left us / Just for a riband (Band) to stick in his coat.
Onomatopoeia the use of words which imitate the sound they refer to. (adj. onomatopoeic
the stuttering (stottern) rifles’ rapid rattle / The cuckoo whizzed past the buzzing bees.
Rhyme (Reim): the use of words which end with the same sounds, usually at the end of lines.
Tiger! Tiger!burning bright / In the forests of the night.
Internal rhyme: rhyme within a line.
letters of joy from girl and boy
Impure rhyme: inaccurate (ungenau) repetition of sounds.
hill - full; man - mean; sky - fine; seem - weak
Eye-rhyme: rhyme that does not depend on sound but on spelling.
flow - how, beat - great, over - discover.
In older poems one has to consider that words were (maybe) pronounceddifferently from today.

STRUCTURE

Parallelism : the deliberate (absichtlich) repetition of similar or identical words, phrases or constructions in neighbouring lines, sentences or paragraphs.
Anaphora a form of parallelism where a word or several words are repeated at the beginning of successive (aufeinander folgend) lines, sentences or paragraphs.
In every cry of every man / In everyinfant’s cry of fear / In every voice, in every ban. (Blake London)
Inversion (Inversion): a change of the ususal word order (subject-verb-object).
A lady with a dulcimer (Hackbrett) / In a vision once I saw.
Chiasmus: a reversal in the order of words so that the second half of a sentence balances the first half in inverted (umgekehrt) word order.
Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love....