DeviceA
Alliteration
What is alliteration in poetry? It's the repetition of the same consonant sound at the beginning of closely situated words in a line. A fun…
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Read the entryThe Craft Atlas · Reference
Poetic DevicesThe figures of speech and the moves that make poetry move.
21 short reference entries on the named techniques poets use — metaphor, enjambment, irony, anaphora and the rest. Each entry holds a clean definition, annotated examples from the corpus, and the famous poems that turn on it.
Collection I · Sound & music
Sound & music.
The aural devices — how a line feels in the ear before the meaning lands.
DeviceA
Assonance
What is assonance in poetry? This question often pops up when you notice a line has a musical quality, but you can't quite put your finger o…
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Consonance
What is consonance in poetry? It's when the same consonant sound is repeated in nearby words — often in the middle or at the end of words, n…
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Onomatopoeia
What is onomatopoeia in poetry? It’s a question that pops up when someone reads a line that seems to *echo* the sound it describes — like a…
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Rhyme
What is rhyme in poetry? Simply put, rhyme occurs when two or more words end with the same sound — think "cat" and "hat," "moon" and "June,"…
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Collection II · Figurative language
Figurative language.
The devices that say one thing and mean another — image, comparison, the leap from the literal.
DeviceH
Hyperbole
What is hyperbole in poetry? Simply put, it’s an intentional exaggeration — stating that something is much bigger, smaller, older, faster, o…
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Read the entryDeviceI
Imagery
What is imagery in poetry? Simply put, imagery refers to language that engages the senses — sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. When a po…
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Metaphor
What is a metaphor in poetry? Simply put, a metaphor claims one thing *is* another thing — not that it's *like* another thing, but that it *…
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Metonymy
What is metonymy in poetry? It's when a poet uses one term to represent something closely related. Unlike symbols or metaphors, metonymy rel…
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Personification
What is personification in poetry? It's when a poet gives human qualities—like feelings, actions, voices, and intentions—to something non-hu…
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Simile
What is a simile in poetry? This question often arises when a teacher points to a line like "my love is *like* a red, red rose" and asks you…
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Symbolism
What is symbolism in poetry? Simply put, symbolism occurs when a poet uses a tangible object, person, place, or event to represent something…
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Synecdoche
What is synecdoche in poetry? It's a question that comes to mind when a poet talks about a ship as "sail" or a soldier as "sword" and you re…
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Collection III · Rhetorical turns
Rhetorical turns & paradox.
The devices that swerve — addresses, ironies, contradictions held in the same line.
DeviceA
Apostrophe
What does it mean when a poet suddenly turns and speaks directly to something that isn’t there — a deceased person, an abstract idea, the wi…
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Irony
What is irony in poetry? Simply put, irony refers to the difference between what is said and what is meant, or between what we expect and wh…
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Oxymoron
What is an oxymoron in poetry? It's that question that pops up the moment you read a phrase like "sweet sorrow" and think — wait, can someth…
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Paradox
What is a paradox in poetry? It's that intriguing moment when a poem presents something that seems utterly impossible or self-contradictory…
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Collection IV · Structure & rhythm
Structure, rhythm & reference.
The devices that work at the level of the line and the stanza — repetition, line breaks, allusion to the canon.
DeviceA
Allusion
What is allusion in poetry? It's the question you might ask when a poem mentions a figure or place you partly recognize — like Icarus, Eden,…
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Anaphora
What is anaphora in poetry? It's the technique of repeating the same word or phrase at the start of consecutive lines or clauses. That's the…
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Enjambment
What does it mean when a poem's sentence continues past the end of a line? That's called enjambment. The term comes from the French word for…
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Repetition
What is repetition in poetry? It's just what it sounds like: a poet intentionally repeats a word, phrase, line, or sound. But that straightf…
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Anatomy of an entry
What you’ll find inside each device.
A clean definition
What the device is, in plain English. Two sentences, no glossary required, and a note on the family it belongs to.
Annotated examples
Short lines from the corpus with the device marked and a one-sentence why-it-works. Built so you can quote them in an essay.
Famous poems that turn on it
Three to five poems where the device is doing the heavy lifting, each one a link to the full text and analysis.
Common confusions
Metaphor vs simile, assonance vs consonance, irony vs sarcasm — the lines students keep slipping on, drawn clearly.
Companion atlas
Devices are tools.Forms are containers.
A poem uses a device in the way a carpenter uses a chisel — to make one specific cut. Metaphor, anaphora, enjambment: all moves. A form, by contrast, is the shape the whole piece sits inside. A sonnet, a haiku, a villanelle — each one a pre-tuned room the poet decided to write in.
You can use any device in any form. Knowing both is what lets you read a poem architecturally — to see why a particular tool sits where it does, in the room it ended up in.
Open the forms atlas →Postscript
Questions about the index
A device is a single move — a metaphor, an enjambed line break, a piece of anaphora. A form is the whole structural plan of the poem — sonnet, haiku, villanelle. You use devices inside a form; the form is the room, the devices are the furniture.
A simile names the comparison out loud (‘her eyes were like stars’); a metaphor does the comparison silently (‘her eyes were stars’). Both put two things together; the simile keeps the seam visible. Every entry that has a near-twin includes a ‘common confusions’ section flagging exactly where the line is.
These are the devices that turn up most often in school syllabi, editorial criticism, and real reader questions. We started with the core glossary of GCSE / AP Lit / Leaving Cert / IB, then added the ones that come up over and over in the poems Storgy already indexes. Less common devices (zeugma, polyptoton, antimetabole) are queued for the next edition.
Search for the closest related entry — most rarer devices live as a family member of one of these 21. If you still can’t find it, the device is probably queued for the next edition. Tell us what’s missing.
Every example is from a poem we already host in the Storgy corpus — meaning you can click through and read the whole poem, with our line-by-line analysis, on the same site. We don’t quote excerpts we can’t back up with the full text.
Yes. We recommend treating Storgy the way you’d treat any online reference — name the entry, the URL, and the access date. If your school uses a specific citation style (MLA, APA, Harvard), the format on the entry page works as a starting point.
The Storgy editorial desk drafts each entry, Claude Sonnet 4.6 extends it under a strict structured-output schema, and the result is humanised to remove machine-writing tells. The example selections and the common-confusion notes are all human-edited.
Yes. Twenty-one is the founding edition. The next batch adds the next-most-asked devices (zeugma, polyptoton, antimetabole, parataxis, hypotaxis, and a few more) plus better cross-references between entries.