Figurative Language- Figures of Speech (Rhetorical Figures)

A contrast or opposition. Two phrases or clauses having an opposite or conflicting meaning brought together in a parallel structure.

Ex: "Hell rises, Heaven descends, and dance on Earth."

A figure of repetition in which the same word or phrase is repeated in (and usually at the beginning of) sucessive lines, clauses or sentences.

Ex: "What...
What..."

A figure with repeated parallel clause structure.

Ex: "Who will say 'corpse' to his vivid cast? Who will say 'body to his opaque repose?"

Simple repetition of a word (with no words intervening)

Ex: alone, alone, all all alone.

Figure of repetition in which a word or phrase appears both at the end of one clause, sentence or stanza and at the beginning of the next.

Ex: .."In fairy lands forlorn.
Forlorn! the word..."

A pattern of criss-crossing. Two phrases of parallel syntactic structure but reversed word order.

Ex: "Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure."

Literally a "yoking", Zeugma is achieved by a verb with two objects or subjects. A special kind of zeugma, syllepsis, results when the yoking term agrees grammatically with only one of the terms to which it is applied, or applies to each in a different sense.

Ex: "Dost sometimes Counsel take- and sometimes Tea"

A change of construction in mid-sentence

Ex: "But when I saw- Oh! Had I never seen"

A question asked solely to produce an effect or to make an assertion and not to elicit a reply, as “What is so rare as a day in June?”
"Is the ridicule to live so long,
The deathless Satire, and immortal Song?"

A figure of anticipation or foreshadowing

Ex: "So the two brothers and their murdered man/rode past."

Referring to a moment of doubt or deliberation by the speaker

Ex: "Do I wake or sleep?"