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Figurative Language

Definition:

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Figurative Language: Language expanded beyond its usual literal meaning to achieve emphasis or to express a fitting relationship between things essentially unlike.

A figurative expression usually contains a stated or implied comparison.

Among the more common figures of speech are:
        - Simile
        - Metaphor
        - Personification
        - Hyperbole

An effective figure of speech is brief and forceful, surprising but appropriate.

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Simile

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- Simile: a comparison between two things using like or as
    - "He plays like an animal!"
            - Actually, no.  He probably plays much better than any animal attempting to play a sport.  The meaning is not literal.  Instead, the meaning is that "he" has certain attributes of an animal such as tenacity or aggressiveness.


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Metaphor

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- Metaphor: a comparison between two things without using like or as
        - "That car is a tin can."
        - The vehicle is not an over sized soda can on wheels, but the metaphor implies that the similarities are that it is light, cheap, and easily crushed.   


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Personification

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- Personification: a figure of speech when human attributes are given to non-humans, such as: animals, objects, or ideas.  
        - "The wind screamed and all the trees could do was groan in reply."  
            - Neither the wind nor the trees have vocal cords, but the human vocal characteristics help portray the sounds they make during a storm.


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Hyperbole

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- Hyperbole: it is also a figure of speech, and it uses great exaggeration to emphasize strong feeling and to create a satiric, comical, or sentimental effect.
        - "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse!"
            - There is no physical way all the meat on a horse can fit in your belly in one sitting.
       - "I'm so embarrassed that I could die!"
            - Dying of embarrassment is still not a medical disease.
       - "This day will never end!"


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Figurative Language in "Miss Rosie"

"Miss Rosie"

by: Lucille Clifton

When I watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels

or
when I watch you
in your old man's shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week's grocery

I say
when I watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in Georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
I stand up
through your destruction
I stand up

Finding the Figurative Language Devices

Imagery
        Sitting, surrounded by the smell
        of too old potato peels

•        The sense of smell is used in this sentence to describe the unwashed   smell of Miss Rosie.
Hyperbole
        When I watch you
        You wet brown bag of a woman
        Who used to be the best looking gal in Georgia

•        This is an exaggeration because it is highly unlikely that she is the “best looking gal in Georgia.”
Simile
        Sitting, waiting for your mind
        like last week’s grocery

•        In these sentences, “mind” is compared to “grocery.”
•        The word like is used to link and compare “mind” with “grocery.”
Metaphor
        When I watch you
        you wet brown bag of a woman

•        In this sentence a bag is being compared to the woman.
•        A wet brown bag is saggy and dingy. This suggests that the woman is beaten down and dirty.

About the Poem

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•         Miss Rosie is homeless, a street person surrounded by her foul-smelling possessions.

–        She is not a stranger to the narrator, who has thought long and hard about her present circumstances and how she might have been long ago before she became a familiar sight in the neighborhood.

–        Now reduced to rags, this "wet brown bag of a woman," says the narrator, once was "the best looking gal in Georgia."
•         The narrator "stand[s] up" for her through her "destruction."
It is easier to look beyond the Miss Rosies of the street, to ignore their presence.
•         This narrator either imagines a past or knows her origins.
•         What is important is that Miss Rosie is recognized by the narrator and provided with a story.
•         She is important, human, and worth our attention.


"Miss Rosie" is taken from Lucille Clifton's first collection of poems, Good Times. Resilience  in the face of life's troubles is a persistent theme in that collection. Many of her poems celebrate her African ancestry.  She is able to trace her roots to Dahomey, which was the colonial name of the present day West African country, Benin.

Figurative Language is the Opposite of literal Language.

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•         It is not meant to be understood exactly as it appears.
•         It depends largely on imaginative comparisons t express its meaning.
1. In lines 1-4, to what is Miss Rosie compared?
2. What does the comparison in lines 9 and 10 indicate about Miss Rosie’s state of mind and her source of food?
3. How does the comparison to a “wet brown bag” reinforce the picture in the first lines?


Figurative Language in "Making a Fist"

"Making a Fist"

 by: Naomi Shihab Nye

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern
            past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside
            my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all
            my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.
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Questions

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Naomi Shihab Nye
•         What is the setting of stanzas 1-2?
•         What does the speaker think is happening to him or her?
•         What is apparently wrong with the child?
•         In the first stanza, what imagery helps the reader experience the car ride?
•         Compare and contrast the significance of the hand in stanza 2 and stanza 3.
•         Do you thing the poem ends on an optimistic or pessimistic note? Explain.

Figurative Language is expanded beyond its usual literal meaning to express emphasis or relationships between unlike things.

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•         In the first two stanzas, what figurative language helps you experience the child’s feelings?

–        Her life seems to slide out of her (l. 2)

–        The swirling palm trees are “sickening” (l. 5)

–        She compares her stomach to a halved melon.

–        She begs her mother
Personification

•         Can you find an example of personification in Stanza 3?

Metaphor

•         Can you find the metaphors in Stanza 1?

Symbolism

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Definition: Something concrete, such as an object, person, place, or action that stands for something more abstract, such as an idea, a feeling, or an emotion. Authors often use symbols to enrich their stories, poems, or dramas.
•         What do you think “borders” and “backseat” really are in stanza 3?

–        The borders may be passing years, births, deaths.

–        The “backseat” reflects and aspect of the narrator which still does not feel in control of its own destiny.

•         The car ride that she takes with her mom at a young age symbolizes her life and the fact that the journey through life would not be easy.

•         In stanza 3 she talks of crossing boarders.

The clenching of the fist is meant to symbolize our willingness to soldier on, our desire not to quit, not to give in. It’s meant to symbolize our inner spirit, our pride, our heart.

•         These are meant not to represent the borders of states that she would cross on her road trip, but the boarders of different aspects of our lives, things that we need to get past in order to have fulfilling lives: trials, tribulations, and roadblocks to happiness.

Simile in "Velvet Shoes"

"Velvet Shoes"

by : Elinor Wylie
Let us walk in the white snow
          In a soundless space;
With footsteps quiet and slow,
          At a tranquil pace,
          Under veils of white lace.

I shall go shod in silk,
          And you in wool,
White as white cow's milk,
          More beautiful
          Than the breast of a gull.

We shall walk through the still town
          In a windless peace;
We shall step upon white down,
          Upon silver fleece,
          Upon softer than these.

We shall walk in velvet shoes:
          Wherever we go
Silence will fall like dews
          On white silence below.
          We shall walk in the snow.

About the Author: Elinor Wylie

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Elinor Wylie's wealthy, cultured family sent her abroad during her eighteenth year to travel and to attend the parties of the social season in London and Paris..  Wylie was serious about her poetry, which she began  writing in her teens.  She worked diligently at perfecting what she described as short line," and "clean small stanzas, brilliant and compact."

Use of Simile

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- Simile: a comparison between two dissimilar things using like or as.

Metaphor in "O Daedalus, Fly Away Home"

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The poem is set in Georgia, at night, among the slaves.  The lines follow the rhythm of the coonskin Drum and the thrum of the banjo. So strong is the beat and so musical the words that reading the poem aloud results in something very close to singing.
        Night brings the slaves time for throwing off their shackles, both physical and mental, time for remembering Africa in the juba dance they have brought with them from across the ocean.  Night's cloak of darkness makes it possible to conjure up memories and dreams.   Night acts for them the way a juju man, a wielder of supernatural powers, would.
        Lines 6 and 7 (which are repeated later int eh poem as a sort of chorus) reveal the depth and the intensity of the slave' yearning, a desire hidden beneath the nighttime jubilee, a longing "to make two wings" to use to fly away, back to their native land.
        The poem is rich in references to culture and legend.  The line "to make two wings" recalls an old Negro spiritual: "O Lord, I want two wings / To scale the gate / O Lord, I want two wings to fly away." In this lively song, the words two wings are sung on high, bright notes that leap up from the sorrowful-sounding bass of "O Lord, I want . . ."
        The poet, Robert Hayden, alludes both to the Greek myth of Daedalus and to a tale of black people who could fly.  According that that legend, there once was a tribe of Africans who were able to fly.  When they were taken as slaves, many members of their tribe escaped their cruel  bondage by flying home to Africa.  The myth was kept alive in the slaves' quarters and around their campfires: "my gran, he flew back . . . home" (ll. 12-14).
        The night moves on and the party dies down; the night is now compared to a "mourning juju man." Can he really work the magic necessary to fly his people home? The poem ends with the cry to Daedalus, the same cry used int eh title and interspersed with the narrative.   It is a final declaration of anguish and desire.

About the Author

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Robert Hayden once described his vision of humanity as being all embracing.  His work attests to his sincerity.  Hayden was twice appointed Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress; he was awarded the English language poetry prize and the First World Festival of negro Arts at Dakar, Senegal; and he was elected to the National Academy of Poets in 1975.

Metaphor: Night

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Night is the subject of all the metaphors.  Its presence in the poem is pervasive. 
Setting:
    The setting is established and the speaker, one of the slaves, uses a lilting rhythm that suits the idea of the poem.

Allusion: Daedalus & Icarus

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Unlike in the title, the allusion in the poem is subtle, made by the poet through his speaker-character, for whom the reference is not allusion, but experience with his own "gran."

Simile and Metaphor in "The Courage That My Mother Had"

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"The Funeral," by Gordon Parks

Gordon Parks

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•         Gordon Parks, a native of Ft. Scott, Kansas, is best known as a photographer and filmmaker, but he also wrote books of poetry.

•         In an interview he claimed he liked writing poetry best, but making a living directed his energies to other fields.

•         Like Parks, many arts practitioners find writing poetry helps them to learn techniques that adapt to other uses.

•         Parks was adept at screenwriting, fiction, memoir, essays, and narrative photography as well as poetry.

•         He published 20 books.


The Funeral


After many snows I was home again.
Time had whittled down to mere hills

The great mountains of my childhood.
Raging rivers I once swam trickled now

                                                       like gentle streams
And the wide road curving on to
China or
                 Kansas City or perhaps Calcutta

Had withered to a crooked path of dust
Ending abruptly at the county burial ground.
Only the giant that was my father

                                                  remained the same.
A hundred strong men strained beneath his coffin
When they bore him to his grave.

Hyperbole

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Hyperbole in this poem is used to express the greatness of the speaker's father.  When he returns home, everything about home that was exaggerated by his youth it lessened by the reality of adulthood, except his father who "remained the same." When the speaker says, "A hundred strong men strained beneath his coffin
When they bore him to his grave," he is speaking of the figurative size of his father.  This size symbolizes the greatness of his father.

Archetype:

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•         Homecoming is an archetypal situation, like the biblical Prodigal Son’s return.

Archetype: the original pattern or model from which all things of the same kind are copied or on which they are based; a model or first form; prototype.

Terms to Know:

- Simile
- Metaphor
- Personification
- Hyperbole
- Symbol
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