Poems with Figurative language is a way of using words to express ideas more imaginatively and creatively.
Instead of taking words literally, you use them to create a picture in the reader’s mind. It adds depth and meaning to writing by comparing one thing to another.
Types Of Poems With Figurative Language:
Simile:
A simile compares two things using the words “like” or “as.”
Example: The stars twinkled like diamonds in the night sky.
Metaphor
A metaphor is a direct comparison between two unrelated things, suggesting that they are the same.
Example: His smile was a ray of sunshine.
Personification
Personification gives human qualities to non-human things or abstract ideas.
Example: The wind whispered through the trees.
Hyperbole
Hyperbole uses exaggeration for emphasis or effect.
Example: I’ve told you a million times to clean your room.
Alliteration
Alliteration is the repetition of the same consonant sound at the beginning of nearby words.
Example: Sally sells seashells by the seashore.
Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia uses words that imitate the sound they represent.
Example: The bees buzzed around the flowers.
Idiom
An idiom is a phrase that means something different from its literal interpretation.
Example: It’s raining cats and dogs.
Symbolism
Symbolism uses symbols to represent deeper meanings or ideas.
Example: A dove is a symbol of peace.
Irony
Irony is when there’s a difference between appearance and reality, or between what is expected and what actually happens.
Example: The fire station burned down.
Imagery
Imagery creates a vivid picture using descriptive language that appeals to the senses.
Example: The aroma of fresh-baked cookies filled the air.
Let’s read some poems with creative language.
Summer’s Honey
By William Shakespeare
“O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
Against the wrackful siege of batt’ring days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?”
“Onions”
By William Matthews
“Slowly the onions
go limp and then nacreous
and then what cookbooks call clear,
though if they were eyes you could see
clearly the cataracts in them,” (lines 9-13).
“Blackberrying”
By Sylvia Plath
“Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving,”
“Still I Rise”
By Maya Angelou
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room
Tartary
By Walter De La Mare
And in the evening lamps would shine,
Yellow as honey, red as wine,
Her bird-delighting, citron trees
In every purple vale!
Little Boy Blue
By Mother Goose
Little Boy Blue,
Come blow your horn,
The sheep’s in the meadow,
The cow’s in the corn.
But where is the boy
Who looks after the sheep?
He’s under a haystack,
Fast asleep.
Like Stars In The Sky
By Michele Meleen
Friends are like the stars in the sky,
always there even when you can’t see them.
They shine brightly in dark times,
guiding me as the North Star does for travelers.
In daylight, they blend in,
a natural part of my every day.
Friendship
By Emma Guest
A friend is like a flower,
a rose to be exact,
Or maybe like a brand new gate
That never come unlatched.
A friend is like an owl,
Both beautiful and wise.
Or perhaps a friend is like a ghost,
Whose spirit never dies.
A friend is like a heart that goes
Strong until the end.
Where would we be in this world
If we didn’t have a friend.
A Coat
By William Butler Yeats
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song of Sorrows
If our lives were but an illusion
And we never had to die
Then such songs would i sing to you
Until the end of time
For you i would walk thru fire and rain
Shed a thousand tears and endure pain
For you are my life; my love
A fallen angel sent from above
Fragment Of Poetic Life
By Alkas
I am possessor
of some poetic grace!
Sentenced to have some happiness
in commented praise..
But not having it in my pocket
no pecuniary pleasure…
This is the poet’s life!
Note to Self
By Donna Marie
Be like the willow that bends,
shade that it sends,
peace that it lends.
During the breeze
its leaves will appease
and shift with ease.
Enduring, alluring, maturing.
Be like the willow that bends
Sailing To Byzantium
By W. B. Yeats
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
Your Last Drive
By Thomas Hardy
And on your left you passed the spot
Where eight days later you were to lie,
And be spoken of as one who was not;
Beholding it with a heedless eye
As alien from you, though under its tree
You soon would halt everlastingly.
You Left Me
By Emily Dickinson
You left me, sweet, two legacies, —
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had He the offer of;
You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me
Before The Storm
By Kelly Roper
The air was heavy like a wet towel that needed
to be rung out,
And the thunderheads began to rumble like
an angry volcano.
The wind stirred up in fury like a swarm of
locusts suddenly taking flight,
And then the heavens opened and drenched
the thirsty earth.
Mom’s Embrace
By Michele Meleen
My mom is like a cloud,
comfortable and strong.
I am like a raindrop
she keeps safe and sound.
When I am fully formed
she’ll let me go
dropping into the world
like a raindrop to the ground.
Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
By Robert Frost
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
In The Nature
By Stephanie Mcgrath
In the nature is beauty
in the nature is earth
in the nature I find my worth
in the nature is peace
in the nature i find myself
in the nature every lasting greens
In the nature there is more to be seen
in the nature a beauty untold
In the nature everything is worth more than gold
Kubla Khan
By S. T. Coleridge
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
Morte d’Arthur
By Lord Tennyson
So all day long the noise of battle roll’d
Among the mountains by the winter sea;
Until King Arthur’s table, man by man,
Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord,
King Arthur: then, because his wound was deep,
The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,
Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights,
And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,
A broken chancel with a broken cross,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land.
On one side lay the ocean, and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full.
All the World’s a Stage
By William Shakespeare
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;…
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad…
second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Ode To A Nightingale
By John Keats
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,..
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,….
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow…
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;…
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud
By William Wordsworth
“I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden Daffodils
This is all about poems with figurative language.