Other figures
Perhaps the humblest figure of speech — if not one of the most familiar — is the pun. A pun is a play on words that relies on a word having more than one meaning or sounding like another word. For example, “A fad is in one era and out the other” is the sort of pun that produces obligatory groans. But most of us find pleasant and interesting surprises in puns. Here’s one that has a slight edge to its humor.
Pragmatist 1985
Apocalypse soon
Coming our way
Ground zero at noon
Halve a nice day.
Grimly practical under the circumstances, the pragmatist divides the familiar cheerful cliché by half. As simple as this poem is, its tone is mixed because it makes us laugh and wince at the same time.
Puns can be used to achieve serious effects as well as humorous ones. Although we may have learned to underrate puns as figures of speech, it is a mistake to underestimate their power and the frequency with which they appear in poetry. A close examination, for example, of Robert Frost’s “Design,” or almost any lengthy passage from a Shakespeare play will confirm the value of puns.
Synecdoche is a figure of speech in which part of something is used to signify the whole: a neighbor is a “wagging tongue” (a gossip); a criminal is placed “behind bars” (in prison). Less typically, synecdoche refers to the whole used to signify the part: “Germany invaded Poland”; “Princeton won the fencing match.” Clearly, certain individuals participated in these activities, not all of Germany or Princeton. Another related figure of speech is metonymy, in which something closely associated with a subject is substituted for it: “She preferred the silver screen [motion pictures] to reading.” “At precisely ten o’clock the paper shufflers [office workers] stopped for coffee.”
Synecdoche and metonymy may overlap and are therefore sometimes difficult to distinguish. Consider this description of a disapproving minister entering a noisy tavern: “As those pursed lips came through the swinging door, the atmosphere was suddenly soured.” The pursed lips signal the presence of the minister and are therefore a synecdoche, but they additionally suggest an inhibiting sense of sin and guilt that makes the bar patrons feel uncomfortable. Hence the pursed lips are also a metonymy, as they are in this context so closely connected with religion. Although the distinction between synecdoche and metonymy can be useful, a figure of speech is usually labeled a metonymy when it overlaps categories.
Knowing the precise term for a figure of speech is, finally, less important than responding to its use in a poem. Consider how metonymy and synecdoche convey the tone and meaning of the following poem.
The Hand That Signed the Paper 1936
The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.
The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose’s quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.
The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.
The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor stroke the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.
The “hand” in this poem is a synecdoche for a powerful ruler because it is a part of someone used to signify the entire person. The “goose’s quill” is a metonymy that also refers to the power associated with the ruler’s hand. By using these figures of speech, Thomas depersonalizes and ultimately dehumanizes the ruler. The final synecdoche tells us that “Hands have no tears to flow.” It makes us see the political power behind the hand as remote and inhuman. How is the meaning of the poem enlarged when the speaker says, “A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven”?
One of the ways writers energize the abstractions, ideas, objects, and animals that constitute their created worlds is through personification, the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things: temptation pursues the innocent; trees scream in the raging wind; mice conspire in the cupboard. We are not explicitly told that these things are people; instead, we are invited to see that they behave like people. Perhaps it is human vanity that makes personification a frequently used figure of speech. Whatever the reason, personification, a form of metaphor that connects the nonhuman with the human, makes the world understandable in human terms. Consider this concise example from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a long poem that takes delight in attacking conventional morality: “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.” By personifying prudence, Blake transforms what is usually considered a virtue into a comic figure hardly worth emulating.
Often related to personification is another rhetorical figure called apostrophe, an address either to someone who is absent and therefore cannot hear the speaker or to something nonhuman that cannot comprehend. Apostrophe provides an opportunity for the speaker of a poem to think aloud, and often the thoughts expressed are in a formal tone. John Keats, for example, begins “Ode on a Grecian Urn” this way: “Thou still unravished bride of quietness.” Apostrophe is frequently accompanied by intense emotion that is signalled by phrasing such as “O Life.” In the right hands — such as Keats’s — apostrophe can provide an intense and immediate voice in a poem, but when it is overdone or extravagant it can be ludicrous. Modern poets are more wary of apostrophe than their predecessors because apostrophizing strikes many self-conscious twenty-first-century sensibilities as too theatrical. Thus modern poets tend to avoid exaggerated situations in favor of less charged though equally meditative moments, as in this next poem, with its amusing, half-serious cosmic twist.
To a Wasp 1984
You must have chortled
finding that tiny hole
in the kitchen screen. Right
into my cheese cake batter
you dived,
no chance to swim ashore,
no saving spoon,
the mixer whirring
your legs, wings, stinger,
churning you into such
delicious death.
Never mind the bright April day.
Did you not see
rising out of cumulus clouds
That fist aimed at both of us?
Moore’s apostrophe “To a Wasp” is based on the simplest of domestic circumstances; there is almost nothing theatrical or exaggerated in the poem’s tone until “That fist” in the last line, when exaggeration takes center stage. As a figure of speech, exaggeration is known as overstatement or hyperbole and adds emphasis without intending to be literally true: “The teenage boy ate everything in the house.” Notice how the speaker of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” exaggerates his devotion in the following overstatement:
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze,
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest:
That comes to 30,500 years. What is expressed here is heightened emotion, not deception.
The speaker also uses the opposite figure of speech, understatement, which says less than is intended. In the next section he sums up why he cannot take 30,500 years to express his love:
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
The speaker is correct, of course, but by deliberately understating — saying “I think” when he is actually certain — he makes his point, that death will overtake their love, all the more emphatic. Another powerful example of understatement appears in the final line of Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” when the disembodied voice of the machine-gunner describes his death in a bomber: “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.”
Paradox is a statement that initially appears to be self-contradictory but that, on closer inspection, turns out to make sense: “The pen is mightier than the sword.” In a fencing match, anyone would prefer the sword, but if the goal is to win the hearts and minds of people, the art of persuasion can be more compelling than swordplay. To resolve the paradox, it is necessary to discover the sense that underlies the statement. If we see that “pen” and “sword” are used as metonymies for writing and violence, then the paradox rings true. Oxymoron is a condensed form of paradox in which two contradictory words are used together. Combinations such as “sweet sorrow,” “silent scream,” “sad joy,” and “cold fire” indicate the kinds of startling effects that oxymorons can produce. Paradox is useful in poetry because it arrests a reader’s attention by its seemingly stubborn refusal to make sense, and once a reader has penetrated the paradox, it is difficult to resist a perception so well earned. Good paradoxes are knotty pleasures. Here is a simple but effective one.
Text Message 2011
Because I think you’re nearly perfect,
I want to love you best:
And since absence makes the heart grow fonder,
We should see each other less.
As the title suggests, the medium is part of the implicit subtext in this quatrain. Consider how the very idea of romantic love is conveyed and built on separation rather than intimacy in this witty paradox.
The following poems are rich in figurative language. As you read and study them, notice how their figures of speech vivify situations, clarify ideas, intensify emotions, and engage your imagination. Although the terms for the various figures discussed in this chapter are useful for labeling the particular devices used in poetry, they should not be allowed to get in the way of your response to a poem. Don’t worry about rounding up examples of figurative language. First relax and let the figures work their effects on you. Use the terms as a means of taking you further into poetry, and they will serve your reading well.