figures of speech--can u notice them in this novel and poem!?

Question

William Shakespeare - Sonnet 18
Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day?

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? a
Thou art more lovely and more temperate: b
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, a
And summer's lease hath all too short a date: b

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, c
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; d
And every fair from fair sometime declines, c
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd; d

But thy eternal summer shall not fade e
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; f
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, e
When in eternal lines to time thou growest: f

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, g
So long lives this and this gives life to thee. g


Oscar Wilde's novel the Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 1 – ‘the studio was filled with the rich odour of roses’.

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.

In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.

Answer 1

These are the main figures of speech and their definitions.

Method: open the link below and click on different links highlighted on the left. You'll access many others belonging to each category/class. Read them closely and try to see if you can identify them in Shakespeare and Wilde's pieces you have asked about.


"Figures by Type with Link Definition"

Tropes figures which change the typical meaning of a word or words

Metaplasmic Figures figures which move the letters or syllables of a word from their typical places

Figures of Omission figures which omit something--eg. a word, words, phrases, or clauses--from a sentence

Figures of Repetition (words) figures which repeat one or more words

Figures of Repetition (clauses and ideas) figures which repeat a phrase, a clause or an idea

Figures of Unusual Word Order figures which alter the ordinary order of words or sentences

Figures of Thought a miscellaneous group of figures which deal with emotional appeals and techniques of argument.



Good luck with the assignment