Metaphor
In As You Like It, Shakespeare writes: "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players." These are the two things being compared.
What are the world and a stage?
OR
What are men/women and players?
To create vivid imagery, a poet must use descriptive language that directly appeals to the reader's five of these.
What are senses?
In "Nothing Gold Can Stay," Robert Frost writes: "So Eden sank to grief, / So dawn goes down to day. / Nothing gold can stay." Frost is alluding to this paradise from the Book of Genesis.
What is the Garden of Eden?
Unlike metaphors, similes explicitly signal a comparison by using one of these two common connecting words.
What are "like" or "as"?
In Robert Frost’s "The Road Not Taken," the two diverging paths in the yellow wood serve as a classic symbol for making these in life.
Answer: What are choices (or decisions)?
Emily Dickinson writes: "Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul..." These are the two things being compared.
What are hope and a bird?
When a poet describes the "crisp, crunching autumn leaves underfoot," they are primary appealing to this specific sense type of imagery.
What is auditory imagery?
Hopping out feeling big as Mutombo, "20 on pump 6," dirty Marcellus called me Dumbo, Twenty years ago, can't forget, Now I can lend him a ear or two"
What are the allusions in this lyric?What is "Dumbo" and Mutombo"?
In "Harlem," Langston Hughes asks if a deferred dream does this: "...crust and sugar over— / like a syrupy sweet?" What is being compared?
What are "a dream deferred" and "a syrupy sweet"?
In literature and poetry, this small, winged creature is globally recognized as a symbol for peace.
What is a dove?
Langston Hughes writes: "Life is a broken-winged bird / That cannot fly." What are the two things being compared?
What are life (without dreams) and a broken-winged bird?
This is the specific literary term for imagery that appeals to the reader’s sense of touch, such as describing a "coarse, abrasive burlap sack."
What is tactile imagery?
When T.S. Eliot writes, "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be," he is using a literary allusion referencing a play written by this author.
What is William Shakespeare?
In "A Red, Red Rose," Robert Burns writes: "O my Luve is like a red, red rose / That’s newly sprung in June; / O my Luve is like the melody / That’s sweetly played in tune." These are the two things his love is compared to.
What are a rose and a melody (or tune)?
In Edgar Allan Poe's famous poem, a large black bird perches above the speaker's door, repeating the word "Nevermore."This bird is a dark symbol for eternal grief and death. DOUBLE JEOPARDY
What is the Raven?
In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo looks up at the balcony and says: "But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? / It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!"
What are Juliet and the sun?
In "Daffodils," William Wordsworth writes: "Ten thousand saw I at a glance, / tossing their heads in sprightly dance."This imagery primarily targets this sense.
What is Visual imagery?
In "Because I could not stop for Death," Emily Dickinson writes that she and Death drove past a school, fields of gazing grain, and finally "the Setting Sun." The setting sun is a deeply rooted literary symbol for this specific phase of life.
DOUBLE JEOPARDY
What is old age (or the end of life/approaching death)?
In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes a motionless ship by writing: "Day after day, day after day, / We stuck, nor breath nor motion; / As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean." This is what the real ship is compared to.
What is a painted ship (on a painted ocean)?
In Walt Whitman's famous elegy for Abraham Lincoln, "O Captain! My Captain!", the "Captain" represents the fallen president, while the "Ship" symbolizes what?
What is the United States (or America)?
F. Scott Fitzgerald ends The Great Gatsby with this famous line: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
What are human beings (or our struggles/lives) and boats rowing against a current?
What are human beings (or our struggles/lives) and boats rowing against a current?
In "Blackberry-Picking," Seamus Heaney writes
"Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair.."
What type of imagery is used?
What is gustatory imagery?
In "The Waste Land," T.S. Eliot writes: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." In this line and throughout elegiac poetry, "dust" or "ashes" serves as a universal symbol for this inevitable human reality.
What is death (or mortality/decay)?
Maya Angelou writes in "Still I Rise": "Just like moons and like suns, / With the certainty of tides, / Just like hopes springing high, / Still I'll rise." Name two of the three natural things she compares her resilience to in these lines.
What are moons, suns, or tides?
In "The Second Coming," W.B. Yeats describes a terrifying vision of the future: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." In these famous lines, the collapsing relationship between the falcon and its controller symbolizes this chaotic state of society.
What is anarchy? (Accept: chaos, collapse of civilization, or loss of social control).