 Giving human characteristics to inanimate objects.
‘ … the moon gazed on my
midnight labours, while,
with unrelaxed and
breathless eagerness, I
pursued nature to her
hiding-places.’
Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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 Drawing a comparison between two different things,
using the words ‘like’ or ‘as’.
‘There was a quivering in the grass which
seemed like the departure of souls.’
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
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 Using exaggeration for emphasis or effect.
‘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 …’
‘To His Coy Mistress’ by Andrew Marvell
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 Using one idea or image to represent
or stand for another.
‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.’
‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost
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 Repetition of the ‘s’ sound in a series of words.
‘ … fishermen pushing out to sea
the sun surfacing defiantly
from the east …’
‘Island Man’ by Grace Nichols
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‘ … Þa com of more
Grendel gongan,
under mist-hleoðum
godes yrre bær …’
(Then came from the moor, under the misty hills
Grendel stalking; the god’s anger bare.)
Beowulf, Book XI
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