Her most popular poem, Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s “Solitude” is about the relationship between the individual and the outside world. The context of the poem suggests that what follows is not a parade of moral platitudes but a series of choices. If you laugh, sing, rejoice, or feast, the world will be drawn to you.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Keep your sense of humor and people will sympathize with you, as in She’s always cheerful and has dozens of friends; laugh and the world laughs with you. This expression actually is part of an ancient Latin saying that concludes, weep and the world weeps with you.

The figure of speech used in this case is a hyperbole. This used to put across the notion that she must have cried a lot.

PERSONIFICATION: In Personification, inanimate objects and abstract notions are spoken of as having life and intelligence. Examples: Death lays its icy hands on King.

In European languages, figures of speech are generally classified in five major categories: (1) figures of resemblance or relationship (e.g., simile, metaphor, kenning, conceit, parallelism, personification, metonymy, synecdoche, and euphemism); (2) figures of emphasis or understatement (e.g., hyperbole, litotes.

Below are the most common figures of speech, along with their definitions, examples, and tips for using them.

• Simile.
• Metaphor.
• Pun.
• Personification.
• Hyperbole.
• Understatement.
• Paradox.
• Oxymoron.

Terms in this set (20)

• Alliteration. The repetition of an initial consonant sound.
• Anaphora. The repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or verses.
• Antithesis. The juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced phrases.
• Chiasmus.
• Euphemism.
• Hyperbole.
• Irony.
• Litotes.

Alliteration Tongue Twisters

• Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
• A good cook could cook as many cookies as a good cook who could cook cookies.
• Black bug bit a big black bear.
• Sheep should sleep in a shed.
• A big bug bit the little beetle but the little beetle bit the big bug back.

An oxymoron is also a noun that’s defined as “a figure of speech by which a locution produces an incongruous, seemingly self-contradictory effect, as in ‘cruel kindness’ or ‘to make haste slowly. ‘” So when contradictory or opposing words are combined, that expression is an oxymoron.

eight parts

There are a total of 9 parts of speech in English: nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections.