Some Poetic Devices

Alliteration - The repetition of initial consonant sounds.
Assonance - The repetition of vowel sounds.

Imagery - Words or phrases that appeal to any sense or any combination of senses.

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.

Meter - The recurrence of a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Onomatopoeia - The use of words which imitate sound.

Personification - A figure of speech which endows animals, ideas, or inanimate objects with human traits or abilities.

Point-of-view - The author's point-of-view concentrates on the vantage point of the speaker, or "teller", of the story or poem.


1st person: the speaker is a character in the story or poem and tells it from his/her perspective (uses "I")

3rd person limited: the speaker is not part of the story, but tells about the other characters but limits information about what one character sees and feels.
3rd person omniscient: the speaker is not part of the story, but is able to "know" and describe what all characters are thinking.
Repetition - the repeating of words, phrases, lines, or stanzas.

Rhyme - The similarity of ending sounds existing between two words.

Rhyme scheme - The sequence in which the rhyme occurs. The first end sound is represented as the letter "a", the second is "b", etc.

Simile - A comparison between two objects using a specific word or comparison such as "like", "as", or "than".

Stanza - a grouping of two or more lines of a poem in terms of length, metrical form, or rhyme scheme.