Poetic Devices in a Brief Glossary

When it comes to literary analysis of a text or poem, you will need a few tools, without which you cannot make a full research. See what these poetic devices are, and learn to use them.

The poetic devices are a few literary tools that the writer or poet employs in order to make the piece of writing more expressive and ultimately valuable. The main poetic devices are the point of view, the metaphor, the simile, the alliteration, the imagery, the metaphor, the assonance, the onomatopoeia, the meter, the personification, the repetition, the rhyme and the rhyme scheme.

Let’s start with the point of view: this is who tells the story of the poem. There are 3 possible points of view: the first person point of view is when the narrator is included in the story and tells everything from their perspective, using ‘I’. Then, there is the 3rd person limited point of view, which means that the teller is not part of the story, telling everything from someone else’s point of view, which is limited to what this character knows. On the other hand, the third person omniscient point of view is the one when the author tells the story in the 3rd person, but knows everything that happens.

In a poem, the most often used poetic devices will be the rhyme, which deals with the ending of words which sound alike. Linked to this there is the rhyme scheme, which is the frequency of the ending words or syllables rhyme or sound alike.

Other poetic devices in poems might be the repetition of certain words or phrases with a poetic intent (the repetition of certain vowel sounds is called assonance, while the repetition of the initial consonants is called alliteration), the simile – which is a comparison between two objects linked by words such as ‘like’, ‘than’ or ‘as’.

A more poetic comparison is the metaphor, which does not employ the words like or as, but tells one object/ feeling/ person by the name of the other object/ feeling/ person that is similar to it: e.g. you say that ‘the sky was a dragon’ (while when you employ the simile you will say ‘the sky was like a dragon’).

The imagery is the use of certain words or phrases which will plea for a relation with the senses: e.g. ‘the sky was a burning fire’.
When you meet words that imitate the sounds, these are poetic devices called onomatopoeia, while the personification means that a certain object/ idea/ feeling/animal is given human features: e.g. the horse speaks.

All in all the poetic devices are just a few, but they give color to the poems and writings that we read, and it is good to know what these poetic devices refer to when you ahev to do a literary analysis.

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