Figurative Language in Poetry

0Every figure of speech can be divided into TWO parts corresponding to what is literally said and what is meant.

0What is literally said, when it stands for something else, may be termed the image. What is meant, what the image stands for, may be called the subject.

0Of the hundreds of figures of speech, four have been singled out by the literary theorist Kenneth Burke as figures of thought, as indispensible means to the discovery and representation of reality.

0The four master tropes are metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony.

0 Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is usually credited with being the first to identify metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony as the four basic tropes (to which all others are reducible), although this distinction can be seen as having its roots in the Rhetorica of Peter Ramus (1515-1572)

0 Each of these four tropes represents a different relationship between the signifier and the signified; Hayden White suggests that these relationships consist of: resemblance (metaphor), adjacency (metonymy), essentiality (synecdoche) and doubling (irony) (White 1979, 97).

METAPHOR

0Metaphor is a “device for seeing something in terms of something else.”

0 “It brings out the thisness of a that, or the thatness of a this” (Burke 503).

0Metaphor is the substitution of a word, image, or idea for another, based on an implied resemblance or analogy.

METAPHOR

0A metaphor is an  implied comparison as opposed to a direct comparison in a simile. 

METAPHOR

0Shakespeare's sonnet 147 offers several examples of metaphor in its opening lines:

0 My love is as a fever longing still,         For that which longer nurseth the disease;Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,The uncertain sickly appetite to please.My reason, the physician to my love,             5Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,Hath left me....

METAPHOR

 Sonnet 18 William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date.

Metonymy

0Metonymy is substitution of the name of an attribute or an adjunct for the name of the thing meant. To put it another way, it is substitution based on contiguity or proximity.

METONYMY

0 effect for cause ('Don't get hot under the collar!' for 'Don't get angry!');

0 object for user (or associated institution) ('the Crown' for the monarchy, 'the stage' for the theatre and 'the press' for journalists);

0 substance for form ('plastic' for 'credit card', 'lead' for 'bullet');0 place for event: ('Chernobyl changed attitudes to nuclear power');0 place for person ('No. 10' for the British prime minister);0 place for institution ('Whitehall isn't saying anything');0 institution for people ('The government is not backing down').

METONYMY

0Roman Jakobson argues that whereas a metaphorical term is connected with with that for which it is substituted on the basis of similarity, metonymy is based on contiguity or closeness

Synecdoche

0 Synechdoche is the substitution of part for whole or whole for part.

0 When we speak of something as a "microcosm," we are using a synecdoche, comparing a part to the whole.

0 At the same time, our synecdoche is a metaphor since we are saying that the part resembles the whole, that the microcosm is a blueprint of the cosmos or world.

0 On the other hand, if the synecdoche does not posit a resemblance between part and whole, it must be a metonymy since the part is an adjunct of the whole and vice versa. A hand has something of the relation to the sailor or farmworker it belongs to as a sword has to a soldier or a pen to a writer who wields it .

IRONY

0 Irony is the substitution of a statement for its opposite. Put another way, in irony what is said in some way contradicts what is meant. The contradiction need not be absolute. In irony, what is said may be understood as true in one sense and false in another.

IRONY

0Example

IRONY

0 This first example of irony is called verbal irony because the speaker intends a meaning at odds with what he says. In novels or drama.

0 However, it is possible for the speaker to mean what he says and yet his words are still ironic because the author intends us to see that in some sense what he is saying is untrue. We call this type of irony dramatic irony.

0 A third kind of irony may be termed irony of circumstance since it involves a situation in which what happens is exactly contrary to expectation. To call a fire in a fire station ironic is to refer to this kind of irony.

IRONY

0 Irony is the most radical of the four main tropes. As with metaphor, the signifier of the ironic sign seems to signify one thing but we know from another signifier that it actually signifies something very different. Where it means the opposite of what it says (as it usually does) it is based on binary opposition.

0 Irony may thus reflect the opposite of the thoughts or feelings of the speaker or writer (as when you say 'I love it' when you hate it) or the opposite of the truth about external reality (as in 'There's a crowd here' when it's deserted). It can also be seen as being based on substitution by dissimilarity or disjunction.

0 Whilst typically an ironic statement signifies the opposite of its literal signification, such variations as understatement and overstatement can also be regarded as ironic. At some point, exaggeration may slide into irony.

IRONY

0However, irony is often more difficult to identify. All of the tropes involve the non-literal substitution of a new signified for the usual one and comprehension requires a distinction between what is said and what is meant. Thus they are all, in a sense, double signs.

0An ironic statement is not, of course, the same as a lie since it is not intended to be taken as 'true'. Irony has sometimes been referred to as 'double-coded'.