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Examples of Literary Terms in Poetry


During the course of this essay, I will discuss how the different poets describe the elements with reference to the literary terms we have discussed in class.

One of many poems describing the weather is Elisabeth Bishop’s “Little Exercise”:

“Think of a storm roaming the sky uneasily / like a dog looking for a place to sleep in …”

“Now the storm goes away in a series / of small, badly lit battle-scenes …”

Here, personification is reinforcing the description of the storm by giving it human characteristics, simile is used when the storm is compared to a dog, and metaphor when the storms departure is compared to battle-scenes. We also find a lot of imagery, used to describe the storm.

Another poem in which these terms are used, is “A Wild Night” by Julia Ward Howe:

“The storm is sweeping o’er the land, / And raging o’er the sea:/ It urgeth sharp and dismal sounds / The Psalm of Misery.”

“When billows strike and jar …”

“The clouds are flying through the sky / Like spectres of affright …”

“The blast doth scourge the forest through …”

In addition to this, flying – sky – affright, in the first quote, is an example of assonance.

In the following quotes from “Rain Travel”, I think William S. Merwin has used imagery to give his readers a more accurate feeling of how this travel was:

“… I hear / the drops falling one by one into / the sightless leaves …”

“… all at once there is no sound but rain …”


In a similar way, imagery is used in Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on A Snowy Evening”:

“… To watch his woods fill up with snow …”

“… Between the woods and frozen lake / The darkest evening of the year.”

“The only other sound’s the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake.”

“The woods are lovely, dark, and deep …”

Furthermore, we find examples of alliteration (watch – woods, dark – deep, sound’s – sweep – easy) and metaphor (in my opinion, the poem as a whole is one metaphor).

“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden:

“… and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, / then with cracked hands that ached / from labor in the weekday weather…”

“Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold …”

There are both imagery and metaphors in these quotes.

And exactly those two literary terms, together with assonance and alliteration, are the ones I have found to be the most prominent in all of the poems. They may be just what makes a poem what it is. It also seems to me that, most of the time, the elements are described indirectly, using evocative language.