"Figures of speech" (imagery) or tropes are word pictures; they are to be ofund on the sensory level of poetry, and they are intended to evoke the senses of taste, touch, sight, smell, hearing, together with the inner "sense" of feelings. Therea re four basic kinds of tropes: descriptions, similes, metaphors and rhetorical tropes.

Description: utilizes adjectives or adjective phrases to modify nouns (GREEN morning, tons OF LOVE), or adverbs and adverbial phrases to modify adjectives (VERY green morning), verbs, (swim SWIFTLY), or other adverbs (swim REALLY swiftly). Many of those who are newly come to poetry don't understand that figurative language (as distinguished from literal language - that is, having to do with actuality) uses few modifiers, but many tropes. As a result, new writers tend to fill up lines with adjectives, adverbs and other modifiers through descriptions.

Similes: Although similies cannot always be identified by finding the words "as" or like," those words are indeed, the tip-off. Omiosis means examination of different things by comparison - "Her smile was like the sun, / As warm as morning light upon the rose" - and by contrast: "But her eyes were cold as the lumen of the moon." Analogy is the means by which simile proceeds, comparing things that are not identical ("He stood as if he were an oak / Braced against the winter wind").

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Metaphors: The difference between simile and metaphor is the difference between analogy and allegory. Similes show the likenesses between things, but no matter how much one modifies a substantive or verb, it will remain essentially unchanged. How does one change a word essentially? The answer is, the poet makes it equivalent, equal to, somehting else. The nature of allegory is to speak about one subject in terms of another, allowing the subject to ecome new again, making it clearer and sharper. The heart of allegory is metaphor. Metaphors go one step further and equate two dissimilar things: A = B. There is no hedging: "The sun is a coin" - the sun is the tenor or subject of the metaphor, and the coin is the vehicle of the metaphor, the predicate nominative that bears the weight of the language equation. Here the obvious point of similarity is the roundness of both coin and sun.

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Rhetorical Tropes: Rhetoric is the art of speaking and writing; it creats an effect in the listener and affects him or her as well. Some tropes are called rhetorical tropes because they create their effects through nonmetaphorical figurs of speech. A complete disquisition on the subject of rhetoric and rhetorical tropes is to be found in the companion volume to this text (Book of Literary Terms).