8

Pre-Assessment:

Identify the figures of speech used in the following poem and prose excerpts. Select the letter that corresponds
to your answer and write it on the space provided before each number.

__________________ 1. “Life is a highway,

I want to ride it all night long
If you're going my way
Well, I want to drive it all night long…”
(Rascal Flatts, “Life is a Highway”)
a) Metaphor c) Onomatopoeia
b) Simile d) Metonymy

__________________ 2. “I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you

Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain…”
(Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”)
a) Apostrophe c) Hyperbole
b) Allusion d) Synecdoche
__________________ 3. The fear of long words is called
“Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.”
a) Reification c) Assonance
b) Irony d) Oxymoron
__________________ 4. “When well-appareled April on the heel,
Of limping winter treads…”
(William Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet”, Act I Scene II).
a) Alliteration c) Consonance
b) Litotes d) Personification
__________________ 5. “Poetry is old, ancient, goes back far. It is among the oldest of living things. So old it is that no
man knows how and why the first poems came.”
a) Assonance c) Cacophony
b) Consonance d) Anaphora

Understanding Prose, Poetry, and Drama

Prose is expression (whether written or spoken) that does not have a regular rhythmic pattern. Prose does
have rhythm, but its rhythm lacks any sustained regularity.
Poetry is expression that is written in verse, often with some form of regular rhythm. The basis of poetic
expression is a heightened sense of perception or consciousness.
Both prose and poetry share many elements. As a result, prose and poetry can be seen as two levels or planes,
each going in opposite directions, but partially overlapping at their common ends. Eventually prose pulls elements
 9

from poetry and poetry pulls elements from prose until each reaches a finite point at which prose becomes poetry
and poetry becomes prose.
Consider this prose poem (a poem with traditional line divisions or lengths) by Charles Baudelaire. Notice the
prose elements at work, such as both left and right margin justification (each line starts and finishes at the same
point) and paragraph identification.

Be Drunk
Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867)

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the

only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks
your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually
drunk.
But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be
drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you
wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock,
everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything
that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as
not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."
Although visually made to look like prose especially its concluding part, this prose poem contains such major
poetic elements like personification (“wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you”), apostrophe (“ask the wind,
the wave, the star, the bird, the clock…”), asyndeton (“everything that is flying, everything that is groaning,
everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking…”), and alliteration – (“burden of
time that breaks your back and bends”), and the intensity of meaning characteristics of poetry, such as symbolism
(being drunk itself is a symbol of passion and lust for life) and other uses of language such as hyperbole (“You
have to be always drunk”). The meaning is reflected and intensified by elements of rhythm and repetition
throughout the work (“be drunk”; “wine, poetry, virtue…”).
Obviously, you need to be constantly alert to the poet’s use of prose techniques and the prose writer’s
borrowing of poetic devices. The divisions between poetry and prose aren’t clear-cut, but here are some generally
accepted differences.

Basis for
Prose Poetry
Comparison
Meaning Prose is a straight forward form of Poetry is that form of literature in which the
literature, wherein the author expresses his poet uses a unique style and rhythm to
thoughts and feelings in a lucid way. express intense experience.
Language Straight forward Expressive or Decorated
Nature Pragmatic Imaginative
Essence Message or information Experience
Purpose To provide information or to convey a To delight or amuse
message.
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Ideas Ideas can be found in sentences, which are Ideas can be found in lines, which are
arranged in paragraph. arranged in stanzas.
Line break No Yes
Paraphrasing Possible Exact paraphrasing is not possible.

Drama is a story intended to be acted out on a stage. Some critics include a pantomime (silent acting), but
others specify that requires dialogue, plot, setting and characters.
Drama is divided into two very broad categories: tragedy and comedy, each with its own characteristics.
Tragedy is one of the oldest forms of drama. The theme of tragedy usually revolves around the ruins of a
dynasty, downfall of a man, emotional betrayals, moral setback, personal loss, death and denials. Protagonists
have a tragic flaw – a characteristics that leads them to their downfall. This form of drama rarely has happy
endings.
Comedy is lighter in tone than tragedy, and provides a happy ending. The intention of the playwrights is to
make their audience laugh. Hence, they use highly improbable situations, stereotyped characters, extravagant
exaggerations, and violent horseplay.

An Overview of Literary Elements and Techniques

Literature holds hidden treasures filled with mysteries to be revealed and intrigues to be discovered. As a
reader, you are an adventurer or on a quest – to find what treasures are buried within the literary selection.
Interpretative skills are the tools that are essential to finding their treasures, and the reader who develops and
practices interpretative skills will uncover the many secrets of meaning and experience literature has to offer.
Interpretative skills involve learning to examine and analyze the literary elements and techniques that work
together in a text. These literary elements and techniques include meaning, form, voice and one, characters and
characterization, and language (uses and meanings).

Meaning
Ask these questions to help you identify and understand meaning:
1. What is the work about? What is the theme?
2. What effect or impression does the work have on the reader?
3. What is the argument or summary of the work?
4. What is the writer’s intent?
Form
Ask these questions to help you identify and understand form:
1. How has the writer organized the literary work to achieve the effect or express the meaning?
2. How is the work structured or planned? As prose or poetry? As topics or scenes? As a long narrative,
several short stories, or episodes?
3. Into what genre could the wok be placed?
4. What method of organization or pattern of development was used within the structure of the work?
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Voice and Tone

Ask these questions to help you identify and understand voice and tone:
1. Who is telling the story?
2. How is the speaker or narrator characterized or his character revealed? By action or by description/
expressed or implied?
3. From what perspective is the story told? By a person outside of the story or by someone actually involved
in the narrative?
4. Is the speaker (the one telling the story) and the author or writer of the work the same person?
5. If the writer and speaker are two different individuals, are their attitudes toward the subject, events, and
readers the same or different.

Character and Characterization

Ask these questions to help you identify and understand character and characterization:
1. Who are the people in the work?
2. How does dialogue (what he or she says) and action (what he or she does) reveal a character’s personality
traits?
3. Is there a principal character?
4. What is the character’s motivation?
5. Is the character’s personality revealed directly by the speaker telling the reader or indirectly by the
character’s own words and deeds (requiring the reader to come to conclusions about the character based
on dialogue and action)?
6. In a non-narrative work, how would you characterize the speaker or the writer? How would you
characterize the work itself?

Language (Uses and Meanings)

Ask these questions to help you identify and understand language:
1. Does the selection include any imagery (the use of sensory images to represent someone or something)?
2. What figures of speech does the writer use, and what effect do they have on the meaning of the selection?
3. How does the writer use diction to convey meaning?
4. What is the impact of the words, phrases, and lines as they are used in the selection?
5. Did the writer intend the words use to convey meanings normally assigned to those words (denotations)?
6. Did the writer intend that some words would imply additional, associated meaning for the reader
(connotation)?
7. What is the significance of those implications to the meaning of the selection and the intent of the writer?
8. How does the use of denotation, connotation and syntax 9how the words are structured and grouped to
form meaningful thought units) relate to the style of the selection?
9. Does the language of the selection include any elements of propaganda?
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Figurative Language
Figurative language is a type of language that varies from the norms of literal language, in which words mean
exactly what they say? Also known as the “ornaments of language,” figurative language does not mean exactly
what it says, but instead forces the reader to make an imaginative leap in order to comprehend the author’s point.
Figurative language can be divided into three main categories: figures of thought, figures of speech and figures
of sound.
Figures of Thought are also called tropes. A trope is the meaning a word has other than its literal meaning.
Trope refers to change or turn, in other words, using a word in other than its literal sense, such as comparison.
Examples are: simile, metaphor, irony, personification.

Figures of speech are also called rhetorical figures or schemes. Rhetorical figures depart, not from the literal
meaning of the words, but from the standard usage or order of the words (or some other departure other than its
meaning), thus making a special effect. Examples are: apostrophe, antithesis, and rhetorical question.
Figures of sound include the sound effect device discussed latter in this chapter. Examples are: alliteration,
assonance, consonance and onomatopoeia.

Figures of Speech based on Analogy

Analogies are drawn to explain, describe, argue, and justify. There are distinct units of thought in analogy: the
vehicle and the tenor. The tenor is the subject or idea you are trying to explain, and the vehicle is the means by
which you explain it.
1. Simile is a stated comparison (usually formed with “like”, “than”, or “as’) between two fundamentally
dissimilar or unlike things that have certain qualities in common.
a) She is brave as a lion.
b) They wore jeans, which made me stand out like a sore thumb.

2. Metaphor is an implied comparison between two unlike things that are actually have something important
in common.
a) Love is a battlefield.
b) Chaos is a friend of mine.

3. Personification is an inanimate object, an animal or an idea is endowed with human qualities or abilities.
a) The car complained as the key was roughly turned in its ignition.

4. Allusion is a reference to, or a representation of, people, places, evens, literary work, myths, or works of
art, either directly or by implication.
a) Hey! Guess who the new Newton of our school is?
b) “Don’t act like a Romeo in front of her.”

5. Reification is the treatment of something abstract as a material or concrete thing.

a) Rose (love)
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b) Mother nature (earth and the environment)

6. Metonymy is a word or phrase substituted for another with which it is closely associated; also, the
rhetorical strategy of describing something indirectly by referring to things around it.
a) “Friends, Romans and countrymen, lend me your ears”
b) Malacañang decides to keep on immigration.

7. Synecdoche is when a part is used for the whole, the whole for a part, the specific for a general, the general
for the specific, or the material for the thing made from it.
a) grey beard (old man)
b) Writing is my bread and butter (bread – food)

8. Synesthesia is a description of one kind of sense impression by using words that normally describe
another.
a) You could cut the tension in the air with a knife.
b) I smell trouble.

Figures of Speech based on Rhetoric

In its broadest sense, rhetoric relates directly to the use of language for the purpose of persuading the readers
or hearers.
Rhetoric traditionally has three main categories or types: deliberate, rhetoric, forensic rhetoric, and epideictic
rhetoric. Deliberate rhetoric is aimed at moving the hearers or readers to some action either pro or con about
some public policy. Forensic rhetoric is aimed at proving someone’s guilt or innocence. Epideictic rhetoric is
aimed at displaying rhetorical skills at some special occasion by praising (or perhaps condemning) a person or
group.
1. Rhetorical Question is a is a question that is asked not to get an answer, but to emphasize a point.
a) “Oh Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

2. Anachronism is an error of chronology or timeline in a literary piece. In other words, anything that is out
of time and out of place.
a) “… he plucked me open his doublet and offered them his throat to cut.”

3. Litotes is an ironical understatement in which affirmative is expressed by the negation of the opposite.
a) They spent seven months apart; that's no small amount of time. (i.e., That's a long time.)
b) "The sword wasn't useless to the warrior."

4. Hyperbole is an exaggeration of ideas for the sake of emphasis.

a) My geography teacher is older than the hills.
b) "So first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
(Franklin Delano Roosevelt)
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5. Paradox is a statement that is self-contradictory because it often contains two statements that are both
true, but in general, cannot be true at the same time.
a) "Death, thou shalt die.”
b) "Men work together whether they work together or apart (Robert Frost)
6. Irony is a situation that may end up in quite a different way than what is generally anticipated. In simple
words, it is a difference between the appearance and the reality.
a) “Go ask his name: if he be married. My grave is like to be my wedding bed.”

Figures of Speech based on Syntax

Syntax is a set of rules in a language. It dictates how words from different parts of speech are put together to
convey a complete thought. The general word order of an English sentence is “Subject” + “Verb” + “Object”. In
poetry, however, the word order may be shifted to achieve certain artistic effects such as producing rhythm or
melody in the lines, achieving emphasis, heightening connection between two words, etc. the unique syntax used
in poetry makes it different from prose.
1. Antithesis is the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced phrases or clauses.
a) “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”,

2. Apostrophe is when someone absent or non-existent person or thing is addressed as if present and
capable of understanding or replying.
a) “Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand?
Come, let me clutch thee!
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.”

3. Asyndeton is the deliberate omission of conjunctions from a series of related clauses.

a) I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks,
innumerable goods.
b) “… and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the
Earth.”

4. Oxymoron is when two opposite ideas are joined to create an effect.

a) The heads of state gathered to determine an approximate solution to the crisis.

Figures of Sound

The poet, unlike the person who uses languages to convey only information, chooses words for sound as well
as for meaning, and uses the sound as a means of reinforcing meaning. Figures of sound or sound-effect-devices
or verbal music is one of the important resources that enable the poet to do something more than communicate
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more information. The poet may indeed sometimes pursue verbal music for its own sake; more often, at least in
the first-rate poetry, it is adjunct to the total meaning or communication of the poem.
1. Alliteration is the repetition of the initial consonant sounds or stressed syllables in neighboring words or
at short intervals within a line or passage.
a) “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly
falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

2. Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences.
a) “Poetry is old, ancient, goes back far. It is among the oldest of living things. So old it is that no man
knows how and why the first poems came.”

3. Onomatopoeia is the formation or use of words which imitates or suggests the source of the sound that it
describes.
a) “The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees…”

4. Anaphora is the repetition of a sequence of words at the beginning of neighboring clauses, thereby lending
them emphasis.
a) “We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing
confidence and growing strength in air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we
shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in
the streets, we shall fight in the hills.”

5. Consonance is the cunning combination of consistently copied consonants. It is when the same consonant
around appears repeatedly in a line or sentence, creating a rhythmic effect.
a) “I'll swing by my ankles.
She'll cling to your knees.
As you hang by your nose,
From a high-up trapeze.
But just one thing, please,
As we float through the breeze,
Don't sneeze.”
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Post-Assessment:

A. Read the lines of poetry. Identify the figure of speech used and then explain in your own words what is meant
by the lines. Slashes represent line breaks. Write your answer on the space provided.
1. The money talks / I won’t deny. / I heard it once, / It said, “Goodbye.”
Figure of speech used: _________________________________________________
Meaning of the line:
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

2. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.

Figure of speech used: _________________________________________________
Meaning of the line:
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

3. Janus writes books for women’s liberation; / His wife types up the scripts from his dictation.
Figure of speech used: _________________________________________________
Meaning of the line:
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

4. I will complain, yet praise; / I will bewail, approve; / And all my sour-sweet days / I will lament and love.
Figure of speech used: _________________________________________________
Meaning of the line:
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

5. Her lips were red, her looks were free, / Her locks were yellow and gold: / her skin was white as leprosy.
Figure of speech used: _________________________________________________
Meaning of the line:
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

6. A new electric fence, / Its five barbed wires tight / as a steel-stringed banjo.
Figure of speech used: _________________________________________________
Meaning of the line:
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

7. A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!

Figure of speech used: _________________________________________________
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Meaning of the line:

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

8. To see a world in a grain of sand / And heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand /
And eternity in an hour.
Figure of speech used: _________________________________________________
Meaning of the line:
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

9. Moon, I am clumsy in these boots. / Loan me a small bird’s feet.

Figure of speech used: _________________________________________________
Meaning of the line:
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
10. “I am unable,” yonder beggar cries, “To stand or move!” / if he says true, he lies
Figure of speech used: _________________________________________________
Meaning of the line:
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

B. Read the lines of poetry. Identify the sound effect device used and then explain in your own words what is
meant by the lines. Slashes represent line breaks.
1. And now the showers / Surrounds the mesa like a troop of silver dancers: / Shaking their rattles, stamping,
chanting, roaring, / Whirling, extinguishing the last red wisp of light.
Figure of speech used: _________________________________________________
Meaning of the line:
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

2. Lord, confound my surly sister, / Blight her brow with blotch and blister, Cramp her larynx, lung and liver,
/ In her guts a galling gives her.
Figure of speech used: _________________________________________________
Meaning of the line:
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

3. Drip-hiss-drip-hiss fall the raindrops / on the oaken log which burns, and steams, and smokes the ceiling
beams. Drip-hiss-the rain never stops.
Figure of speech used: _________________________________________________
Meaning of the line:
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________