Figurative Language

Figurative Language Definition
Figurative language makes use of figures of speech to be extra effective, persuasive, and impactful.

Figures of speech including metaphors, similes, and allusions cross beyond the literal meanings of the words to present readers new insights. On the opposite hand, alliterations, imageries, or onomatopoeias are figurative devices that enchantment to the senses of the readers.

Figurative language can appear in multiple forms with the use of different literary and rhetorical gadgets. According to Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia, the definition of figurative language has five specific bureaucracy:

Understatement or Emphasis
Relationship or Resemblance
Figures of Sound
Errors and
Verbal Games
Types of Figurative Language
The time period figurative language covers a wide range of literary gadgets and techniques, some of which include:

Simile
Metaphor
Personification
Onomatopoeia
Oxymoron
Hyperbole
Allusion
Idiom
Imagery
Symbolism
Alliteration
Assonance
Consonance
Metonymy
Synecdoche
Irony
Sarcasm
Litotes
Pun
Anaphora
Tautology
Understatement
Short Examples of Figurative Language
Similes
His friend is as black as coal.
He has discovered gymnastics, and is as agile as a monkey.
When attacked in his domestic, he will combat like a caged tiger.
Can you dance like a monkey?
Even when he changed into instructed everything, he become appearing like a donkey.
Metaphor
My friend is a Shakespeare while in English class.
He turned into a roaring lion in anger, although now he is silent.
They look like jackals whilst going for walks in fear.
Kisses are roses within the spring.
This international is a sea of nameless faces.
Images
The house stood half-demolished and abandoned.
He left with his haunted and spell-certain face.
He did now not just like the odorless and colorless form of water.
His friend changed into looking at spooky glissando twangs.
Zigzag fissures within the land made him search for snakes.
Assonance
The light on the web page did no longer allow him see the sight.
He heard the sound of the fire, like wire hanging the air.
This artificial stream is going to flow to the downtown of the town.
Please set the kite right.
Might of the fright seems more than the real fear.
Consonance
He shall we the crimson ball fall with a tall man.
They have not discovered a way to seize the cat.
Get a seat with a treat in our local hall.
Calling the cow an ox is like placing the cart earlier than the horse.
He noticed the pink kite floating past the tall trees.
Paradox
He is dying together with his untrustworthy belief.
Sharply blunt razor cannot do whatever to you.
Kindly cruel treatment made him flabbergasted.
Please, watch with closed eyes and you will see the heaven.
Creatively stupid person can't do some thing in his lifestyles.
Metonymy
The Pentagon is located in Washington inside the United States.
The Hollywood is a home of English movies.
10 Downing Street is positioned in London.
Buckingham Palace is world’s oldest image of democracy.
The White House.
Synecdoche
He does no longer know the way to behave with the special people.
He is looking at his own gray hair and his agility.
They noticed a fleet of fifty.
At this time, he owns nine head of cattle.
The new technology is addicted to using plastic money.
Examples of Figurative Language from Literature
Example #1: The Base Stealer (By Robert Francis)
Simile
Poised between going on and back, pulled
Both approaches taut like a tight-rope walker,

Now bouncing tiptoe like a dropped ball,
Or a child skipping rope, come on, come on! …

Taunts them, hovers like an ecstatic chicken,
He’s most effective flirting, crowd him, crowd him,

The similes and phrase desire of this poem makes it a masterpiece. The poet use similes among the lines to depict his scattered thoughts before taking action, and makes evaluation as, “like a tight-rope,” “like a dropped ball,” and “hovers like an ecstatic chicken.”

Example #2: I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings (By Maya Angelou)
Metaphor
But a BIRD that stalks down his slim cage
Can seldom see thru his bars of rage
His wings are clipped and his ft are tied
The caged hen sings with a apprehensive trill …
And his track is heard on the distant hill for
The caged hen sings of freedom.

The whole poem is rich with metaphor as a chook in a cage represents a collection of individuals who are oppressed and can't get freedom. The cage represents physical barriers, fear, addiction, or society; while the music of the bird represents proper self craving for some thing extra in life.

Example #3: She Sweeps with Many-Colored Brooms (By Emily Dickinson)
Personification
She sweeps with many-coloured Brooms
And leaves the Shreds at the back of
Oh Housewife inside the Evening West
Come back, and dirt the Pond!

Dickinson uses personification of a housewife to explain the sunset inside the first actual line of this poem. She is the usage of a sweeping housewife who does her each day work, likewise the rays of the setting solar sweep away under the horizon.

Example #4: The Raven (By Edgar Allen Poe)
Alliteration
Once upon a middle of the night dreary whilst I pondered weak and weary;
uncommon and radiant maiden;
And the silken unhappy unsure rustling of every crimson curtain …
Deep into that darkness peering, lengthy I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming desires no mortal ever dared to dream earlier than.

Poe makes use of alliteration by repeating the /w/ sound to emphasize the weariness of the narrator, and then /r/ and /s/ sounds in the second and 1/3 strains respectively. In the final two strains, the /d/ sound highlights the narrator’s hopelessness.

Example #5: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (By Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Symbolism
Ah ! properly a-day ! What evil looks
Had I from antique and young !
Instead of the move, the Albatross
About my neck turned into hung.

In these strains, the albatross symbolizes a huge mistake, or a burden of sin, much like the move on which Christ turned into crucified. Therefore, everyone on the ship agreed to slay that hen.

Example #6: The Bluest Eyes (By Toni Morrison)
Personification, Consonance, and Simile
She ran down the street, the green knee socks making her legs seem like wild dandelion of stems that had by some means misplaced their heads. The weight of her remark taken aback us.

This excerpt uses exceptional devices that make language figurative. There is a superb use of simile, “legs seem like wild dandelion;” and personification, “misplaced their heads;” and use of consonance in “greatly surprised us,” in which the /s/ is a consonant sound.

Example #7: The Week of Diana (By Maya Angelou)
Metaphor, Consonance, Personification
“The dark lantern of global sadness has forged its shadow upon the land.
We stumble into our distress on leaden ft.”

In just these traces, Maya Angelou has used a metaphor of the darkish lantern, consonance of the /s/ sounds, and personification of distress.

Example #8: The Negro Speaks of River (By Langston Hughes)
Consonance, Simile
“I’ve acknowledged rivers:
I’ve known rivers historical as the world and older than the float of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep just like the rivers.”

This prince of the Harlem Renaissance has beautifully used a different type of consonance with the /l/ sound and a simile of “my soul.”

Example #9: Musée des Beaux Arts (By W. H. Auden)
Personification, Consonance
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, a few untidy spot
Where the dogs cross on with their puppy W. H. Auden lifestyles and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its harmless at the back of on a tree.

W. H. Auden has used a personification of the “dreadful martyrdom,” and consonances of “some untidy spot,” with the /s/ sound, and “dogs move on with their puppy existence,” with the /d/ and /g/ sounds.

Function of Figurative Language
The number one characteristic of figurative language is to force readers to imagine what a writer desires to express. Figurative language isn't always intended to deliver literal meanings, and often it compares one idea with another that allows you to make the first concept less complicated to recognize. However, it hyperlinks the ideas or concepts with the goal of influencing the target market to understand the link, even though it does no longer exist.

Poets and prose writers use this approach to deliver out emotions and assist their readers shape pics in their minds. Thus, figurative language is a useful manner of conveying an idea that readers can't understand otherwise, due to its complex and summary nature. In addition, it allows in reading a literary text.

Fiction Figure of Speech