Literary device
Alliteration
Repetition of the same initial consonant sound across nearby words. One of the oldest sound devices in English and a central organising principle of Old English alliterative verse.
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Literary devices
How metaphor, enjambment, radif, and other devices work — guidelines a poet considers, then bends with care.
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23 devices
Literary device
Anaphora
The repetition of the same word or phrase at the start of successive lines, clauses, or sentences. One of the oldest rhetorical devices, common to prayer, oratory, scripture, and the long lyric.
Literary device
Apostrophe
A direct address to an absent person, an abstraction, an object, or a force of nature. One of the oldest rhetorical figures and a defining gesture of the ode, the elegy, and the lyric address.
Literary device
Assonance
Repetition of the same vowel sound in nearby stressed syllables. The vowel-music counterpart to alliteration — slower, more sustained, often the central organising sound of lyric verse.
Literary device
Caesura
A pause within a line of verse, usually marked by punctuation or a syntactic break, that interrupts the line's flow without ending it. One of the oldest organising devices in lineated poetry.
Literary device
Consonance
Repetition of the same consonant sound in nearby words, anywhere in the word — not only at the start. The consonantal counterpart to assonance and a quieter cousin of alliteration.
Literary device
End-stop
A line whose grammatical sense — and usually its punctuation — closes at the line break. The opposite of enjambment, and the default lineation of much classical and ceremonial English verse.
Literary device
Enjambment
A line that runs past its end into the next, without the syntax pausing where the line breaks. The opposite of the end-stop, and one of the most expressive choices in lineated verse.
Literary device
Epistrophe
The repetition of the same word or phrase at the *end* of successive lines, clauses, or sentences. Anaphora's mirror — closure rather than opening — one of the oldest rhetorical figures.
Literary device
Imagery
Language that calls on the reader's senses — sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, motion, temperature — to produce a vivid mental picture. The foundational sense-device of lyric verse.
Literary device
Metaphor
A figure of speech that names one thing as another, asking the reader to read both at once. Foundational to figurative language across nearly every tradition.
Literary device
Onomatopoeia
Words that imitate the sound they name — *buzz*, *hiss*, *crackle*, *moan*. The most direct of the sound devices, and one of the oldest sources of acoustic meaning in poetry.
Literary device
Personification
Giving human qualities, actions, or speech to a non-human thing — an animal, an object, an abstraction, a force of nature. One of the oldest figures of sense, and a near-relative of metaphor.
Literary device
Qafia
The rhyming word that immediately precedes the radif in a ghazal couplet. Where the radif anchors, the qafia varies — and the discipline of choosing fresh qafias keeps the form alive.
Literary device
Radif
The repeated word or short phrase that ends every second line of a ghazal. One of the form's defining structural devices in the Persian, Urdu, and Arabic poetic traditions.
Literary device
Refrain
A line, phrase, or short passage repeated at fixed intervals in a poem — most often at the end of a stanza. One of the oldest organising devices in lyric, song, and ballad.
Literary device
Rhyme (perfect, slant, internal)
The repetition of matching sounds at the ends of words — most often at line ends, sometimes inside the line. The most-recognised sound device in English-language verse, and one of the most varied.
Literary device
Sibilance
A specialised form of consonance in which the repeated sounds are the hissing fricatives — /s/, /z/, /sh/, /zh/. The quietest of the sound devices and one of the most affectively loaded.
Literary device
Simile
A figure of speech that compares two things using *like* or *as*. The metaphor's hinged, open cousin — slower to land, more visibly marked, often kinder to the reader.
Literary device
Tadmīn
Embedding a complete verse line — often from a different poet or language — directly into one's own composition. Closely related to tazmīn; many sources treat them as variants of one practice.
Literary device
Tazmīn
The classical Arabic, Persian, and Urdu device of taking another poet's line into a new composition, usually by elaborating on it. A figure of homage, conversation, and inheritance.
Literary device
Volta
The structural turn in a sonnet — the moment where the argument, image, or address shifts. Named for the Italian word for 'turn'; one of the defining devices of the European sonnet tradition.
Literary device
Īhām
Deliberate semantic ambiguity — a word chosen so two distinct meanings are both available to the reader at once. One of the most prized devices of classical Arabic, Persian, and Urdu lyric.