ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND POETRY: KEY WORDS TO USE
IMAGES/PICTURES:
Imagery: or ‘word-pictures’ includes: personification, metaphor, similes, sensory
language, adjectives, etc. Any place the writer puts an image or picture in your mind.
Sensory language: touch, taste, smell, sights (colour, light, shape), sounds are used to
create a vivid picture of the scene - to [increase whatever effect/theme the writer is
trying to get across] Link this to sounds (sibilant, plosive, etc.) wherever you can.
Comment on if it’s a positive mood - light, bright, soft; or negative - dull, harsh,
uncomfortable.
Pathetic Fallacy: The poetic convention whereby natural phenomena, which cannot
feel as humans do, are described as if they could: rain‐clouds may ‘weep’, or flowers
may be ‘joyful’ in sympathy with the writer’s mood.
FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE: MOODS
Semantic field or lexical field: a group of words referring to the same topic, e.g.
‘flames’, ‘damnation’ and ‘hell’. This is most worth commenting on where there’s an
interesting contrast, e.g. love described as ‘war’ - something unexpected which shows
us a strange truth about love: it can be hurtful, violent, you can feel destroyed, etc.
This normally highlights a particular mood.
Personification: giving human qualities to non-human things: actions, emotions etc.
E.g. the wind shivered. The crows cackled. The door groaned. The bird looked at me
sadly. The chin of the house jutted angrily into the street.
Metaphor: normally metaphors suggest a mood or feeling. Highlight the key mood
word, quote and comment on it. E.g. Diamonds glinted on the sharp edges of the
water. His eyes were cold blue marbles. The sound died on the air. Sunlight spilled
through the window.
Allegory: An extended metaphor that runs throughout a text.
Simile: easy to spot as one thing is compared to another using like or as. E.g. He was
as sharp as a needle. His eyes burned like dying fires.
Hyperbole: Over exaggeration for emphasis and/or effect.
Irony: A subtle inconsistency, in which an apparently straightforward statement or
event is undermined by its context so as to give it a very different significance.
Synecdoche: A common figure of speech by which something is referred to indirectly,
either by naming only some part or constituent of it (e.g. ‘hands’ for manual
labourers)
SOUNDS
Sibilance: /s/ sounds (not /sh/). Effect depends on context, and the meanings of the
words around it. How to write about it: e.g. The sibilant sounds in ‘softly, sweetly,
sickly’ creates a soft, gentle mood, which turns sinister on ‘sickly’ as the sounds flow
across the line. The unusual shift in mood within the same, sibilant sound creates a
disturbing effect.
