What a poem is made of
The devices a young writer actually reaches for
Metaphor is the device that carries most of the weight in a poem written to be said out loud, because it states that one thing is another thing and leaves the listener to do the joining.
The literary devices in poetry are fewer than a textbook makes them look, and on a stage the number that matters is small: six devices do almost all the work, and the form a poem takes decides the rest. Every page here explains one of them in the version a writer can use tonight: what the device does to a room, what it costs and how it fails.
The six devices that do almost all the work
The six devices that do almost all the work are set out below with their failure modes, because a device is only worth learning together with the way it goes wrong. Each one is a decision about how much the listener has to do, and a poem said out loud gets one pass at that listener: no rereading, no going back up the page, no stopping to work out what a line meant while the next three go past.
| Device | What it does to a listener | How it fails |
|---|---|---|
| Metaphor | States that one thing is another, in a single move | Arrives pre-made: life as a journey, a heart as glass |
| Simile | Marks the comparison with like or as, keeping both things in view | Compares the thing to something vaguer than the thing |
| Imagery | Puts a physical object in the room for a listener to see | Names the feeling instead of what caused it |
| Repetition | Builds a pattern the ear begins to expect | Repeats a weak line, which only makes it weaker |
| Anaphora | Opens line after line the same way, so the poem gathers | Runs past the point where the pattern was interesting |
| The line break | Controls the breath, the pace and where the surprise lands | Falls at random, so the poem sounds like chopped prose |
That order is not a ranking. A poem using one device well beats a poem using all six adequately, and the commonest fault in a first draft is not too few devices but too many, laid over each other until nothing underneath is visible.
Metaphor, and the distance it asks a listener to travel
Metaphor asks a listener to travel a distance, and the length of that distance is the whole of the decision. A short distance is a comparison a room accepts at once and forgets at once. A long one makes the room work, and where the work is worth doing the line stays with them for a week. What sets the distance is not the word like: a simile can be as strange as anything, and a metaphor as tired as a greetings card. The device on its own, with the exercises that get a writer past the second-hand version of it, is the subject of Metaphor, and the choice between a metaphor, a simile and an analogy is settled on Metaphor or simile.
The test for a second-hand comparison is blunt: if you had heard it before you wrote it, it is not yours, and it will do nothing in a room that has heard it as well. Broken glass for a broken heart, a journey for a life, a storm for an argument at home. None of those is wrong, and all of them are used up.
Imagery, and why a listener needs a physical thing
Imagery hands a listener a physical thing, and it is what separates a poem somebody remembers from a poem that was merely true. An abstract noun, such as loss, pride, freedom or fear, tells a room what to feel and gives them nothing to feel it with. A physical detail does the opposite: the room assembles the feeling out of what you handed over, and a feeling somebody assembled is one they own. Sight does most of this work, though sound, smell, touch and taste are all available and are all under-used.
The practical rule is a rule about size. A detail that is too large is really a category, such as a house, a school or a city, and a listener sees nothing at all. A detail about the size of a hand, such as a chipped mug, a bus pass, the third stair or a cut across one knuckle, appears instantly and belongs to you rather than to everybody.
Repetition, and the sharper kind that opens the line
Repetition is the device the microphone was made for, because a pattern is the only structure a listener can hold without seeing a page. Rhyme is one kind of repetition; a repeated line, a repeated image and a repeated grammatical shape are others, and all of them do the same job, which is to tell the ear what to expect so the poem can break the expectation on purpose. The sharper kind opens the line rather than closing it, the same words at the head of line after line, and it has a name and a page of its own: Anaphora.
Repetition fails in one direction only. It makes a strong line stronger and a weak line embarrassing, and it outruns its own interest quickly: a pattern normally earns three or four turns before it has to change or stop. The change is the point. A pattern that never breaks is a chant, and a chant is not an argument.
Where a line breaks, and why the break is a device
A line break is the one mark of punctuation poetry invented for itself, and where it falls decides the pace, the breath and the place the surprise lands. An end-stopped line finishes with its sense complete and lets the room settle. An enjambed line runs its sense over the break, so the listener holds an unfinished thought across the gap and hears the rest arrive slightly late, which is where most of the small shocks in a poem come from.
On a stage a break is heard rather than seen. The audience gets no white space, only a hesitation in which the sentence is still open, so a writer preparing a poem for performance is really deciding where to breathe. Marking the breaths on the page and reading it back is the fastest way to find out whether the breaks are doing anything at all.
Free verse, and what it hands to these devices
Free verse hands these devices more to do than any counted form does, because a poem with no fixed metre and no rhyme scheme is held up by 3 things instead: where its lines break, the image it puts in front of a listener, and the rhythm of ordinary speech. How free verse stands against blank verse, against a prose poem and against a counted form is set out on Free verse. The table above already holds 2 of those 3, which is why the devices on this page and not a rhyme scheme are what a young writer working in Spoken word poetry is really choosing between when a poem has to work tonight.
How to use a device tonight
To use a device tonight rather than name it in an exam, work in this order, and leave the naming until the poem is finished.
- Write the draft with no device in mind at all, because a draft written to demonstrate a technique demonstrates the technique and nothing else.
- Read it aloud once, standing up, and mark every line where your own attention slid off.
- Replace the abstract nouns in those lines with physical things you could photograph.
- Choose one comparison to carry the poem, cut the rest, and push the survivor as far from the obvious as it will go without breaking.
- Decide where the pattern breaks, because the break is the moment the poem turns and a listener is waiting for it whether they know it or not.
- Read it aloud again and cut anything you cannot say without running out of air.
Naming the device afterwards is genuinely useful, and it is the last step rather than the first. Once a writer can say that a stanza works because it opens four lines with the same three words, the move stops being luck and becomes something they can do again on purpose, which is the only reason any of these names exist.