GET YOUR POETRY ON
Shakespeare wrote almost 75% of his plays in verse. He used rhythm and poetic devices in order to share his characters and their stories with the world. Below are some poetic devices you need to understand before you begin.
Alliteration: The repetition of consonants
“Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.”
Macbeth
Assonance: The repetition of vowel sounds
“Beyond all manner of so much I love you.”
King Lear
Imagery: Words that appeal to a sense or any combination of the senses
“Disdaining fortune, with his brandish’d steel,
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Like valour’s minion carved out his passage
Till he faced the slave;”
Macbeth
Metaphor: A comparison between two objects with the intent of giving clearer meaning to one of them. Often forms of the “to be” verb are used, such as “is” or “was”, to make the comparison
“But soft! What light through yonder window
breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”
Romeo and Juliet
Simile: A comparison between two objects using a specific word or comparison such as “like”, “as”, or “than”
“... So we grow together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition,”
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Onomatopoeia: Words that imitate sound
“Buzz, buzz!”
Hamlet
Personification: Giving inanimate objects human characteristics or abilities
“My fairy lord, this must be done with haste,
For night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast”
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Repetition: The repeating of words, phrases, lines, or stanzas
“KING LEAR: So young, and so untender?
CORDELIA: So young, my lord, and true.”
King Lear
Stanza: a grouping of two or more lines of a poem in terms of length, metrical form, or rhyme scheme
“A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head:
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”
Romeo and Juliet
Allusion: An implied or indirect reference to a famous historical figure or literary work
“Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds,
Or memorise another Golgotha
I cannot tell.”
Macbeth
Hyperbole: Exaggeration used for emphasis
“The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touch’d
The very virtue of compassion in thee,”
The Tempest
Apostrophe: The direct address of an absent or imaginary person or thing as though it were present
“Out, damned spot! Out, I say!...”
Macbeth
Iambic Pentameter: A ten-syllable line where the stress is put on every other syllable. Marked like this: ˘' / ˘' / ˘' / ˘' / ˘'
