Allusion
Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you
To a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the hallelujah
-Leonard Cohen Hallelujah
Diction
“Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch,”
John Donne, “The Sun Rising”
Metaphor
Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.
Bible, New Testament
Sentence structure
“They left me alone and I lay in bed and read the papers awhile, the news from the front, and the list of dead officers with their decorations and then reached down and brought up the bottle of Cinzano and held it straight up on my stomach, the cool glass against my stomach, and took little drinks making rings on my stomach from holding the bottle there between drinks, and watched it get dark outside over the roofs of the town.”
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Punctuation
“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three...”
Nabakov, Lolita
Imagery
“O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear;”
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Understatement
“I have to have this operation. It isn’t very serious. I have this tiny little tumor on the brain.”
Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
Hyperbole
I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
Auden, “As I Walked One Evening”
Analogy
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called,”
Reference to authority
'These pills must be safe and effective for reducing. They have been endorsed by Miss X, star of stage, screen, and television.'
Irony
Oedipus vows to find the murderer and curses him for the plague that he has caused, not knowing that the murderer he has cursed and vowed to find is himself.
Alliteration
“The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Contrast
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing.
Goethe
Parallel structure
“To err is human; to forgive divine.”
Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism”