Title: Figurative Language Definition and Examples | Literary Elements
Headings: Types of Figurative Language
Types of Figurative Language
Content: No. This my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, marking the green one red.” In this scene, not even the oceans can wash Macbeth’s hands of King Duncan’s blood. Imagery
Imagery accesses all of the reader’s senses in order to create powerful mental experiences of characters and events, as well as emotional responses to those events. Imagery uses sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell descriptions to cue a reader in on mood, tone, and theme. Imagery is often created by other kinds of figurative language, including metaphors, similes, onomatopoeia, symbolism, and personification. In the novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Dickens paints a grim picture of the fateful morning when Pip sets out to deliver the food and file to the convict, setting the dreary mood for the reader to highlight Pip’s fear and isolation in this ordeal. Pip recalls, “It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief. Now, I saw the damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass, like a coarser sort of spiders’ webs: