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A writer's choice of language — their diction — is the primary tool through which meaning is created. At A-Level, you are expected to analyse language with precision, identifying specific techniques and, more importantly, explaining their effects. This lesson covers the major categories of figurative language and imagery you need to understand.
This lesson develops your language analysis — the ability to identify a writer's verbal choices with precise terminology and, far more importantly, to explain how those choices shape meaning and feeling. Language analysis is the most directly examinable of all the close-reading skills, because almost every question, across every component of AQA A-Level English Literature A (7712), ultimately asks you to show how writers use words.
The governing principle of this lesson is simple and is worth fixing in your mind now: the label is never the analysis. Naming a metaphor earns nothing; explaining what the metaphor does earns everything.
Diction refers to a writer's choice of words. Every word in a literary text has been chosen (or should be treated as though it has been chosen) for a reason. Analysing diction means asking: why this word and not another?
Key Definition: Diction — a writer's choice of words, considered in terms of their connotations, register, sound, and effect.
Consider two ways of describing rain:
The second sentence uses "hammered" — a verb with connotations of violence, aggression, and relentlessness. The diction transforms a neutral description into something forceful and potentially threatening. (These two sentences are illustrative examples written for this lesson, not quotations from any named text.)
A productive technique for analysing diction is the substitution test: mentally replace the writer's word with a plausible synonym and ask what is lost. "Hammered" against "fell", "trudge" against "walk", "withered" against "old" — in each case the substitution exposes the connotative work the original word was doing. You will not write the substitution out in an essay, but performing it silently sharpens your sense of why the chosen word matters.
Figurative language uses words in non-literal ways to create particular effects. The major forms you need to know are set out below.
A metaphor states that one thing is another, creating a direct identification between two unlike things.
Key Definition: Metaphor — a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable, implying a resemblance.
Example: In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth instructs her husband: "look like th' innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't." She does not mean Macbeth should literally become a flower or a serpent. The metaphor identifies innocence with beauty (the flower) and evil with hidden danger (the serpent), drawing on deep biblical associations (the serpent of Eden). The power of the image lies in the concealment it demands: the serpent is "under" the flower, so that the metaphor enacts the very duplicity Lady Macbeth is urging.
To analyse a metaphor with precision, it helps to name its two halves. The tenor is the thing being described (here, the strategy of deceit); the vehicle is the image used to describe it (the flower and serpent). The meaning is generated by the transfer of associations from vehicle to tenor — and the most interesting metaphors are those where the fit between the two is imperfect or surprising, because the gap is where the reader's interpretive work happens.
Extended metaphor — when a metaphor is developed across several lines or even an entire text. John Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" extends the metaphor of a compass (the drawing instrument) across the final three stanzas to represent the connection between separated lovers: as one foot moves, the other "leans and hearkens after it". The conceit is admired precisely because Donne sustains and develops it logically rather than abandoning it after a line.
A simile compares two things using "like" or "as", keeping the comparison explicit.
Example: In Wuthering Heights, Mr Lockwood records that Heathcliff's "black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows" — and elsewhere the novel repeatedly associates Heathcliff with the diabolic. A simile makes its comparison visible on the surface of the sentence, which means the analytical question is always: what does the comparison reveal, and what does the gap between the two halves expose? When a character is compared to "a caged animal", the simile suggests confinement, frustration, and latent violence — and the very fact that the comparison is to an animal quietly dehumanises.
Exam Tip: Do not simply identify "this is a simile." Explain what the comparison reveals. The analysis is in the connotations and in the relationship between the two things compared, not in the label.
A subtle point often missed: a simile, because it keeps the word "like" or "as" on the surface, preserves the distance between the two things, whereas a metaphor collapses it. To say someone is "like a lion" admits they are not one; to say "he was a lion in the fight" asserts an identity. Noticing whether a writer chooses the asserting force of metaphor or the more tentative comparison of simile is itself a point of analysis.
Attributing human qualities to non-human things.
Example: In Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind": "O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being." The wind is addressed as though it can hear and respond, given agency and personality. This elevates a natural force to something almost divine and, through the direct address ("O wild West Wind"), turns description into invocation, as if the speaker were praying to it.
A closely related figure is the apostrophe — the address of an absent, dead, or non-human entity as though it were present and able to listen. Shelley's ode is both personification (the wind is given breath and being) and apostrophe (it is addressed directly). Distinguishing the two precisely is the kind of terminological accuracy AO1 rewards.
These are less commonly discussed but important for sophisticated analysis.
| Term | Definition | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Synecdoche | A part represents the whole (or vice versa) | "All hands on deck" — "hands" represents sailors |
| Metonymy | A related or associated thing represents the original | "The Crown" represents the monarchy; "the pen is mightier than the sword" — pen represents writing, sword represents military force |
These figures compress meaning, allowing writers to evoke complex ideas efficiently. They also direct attention: to reduce sailors to "hands" foregrounds their labour and reduces their individuality, which can be telling in a text concerned with class or exploitation. Metonymy and synecdoche are never neutral; the choice of which part or association stands for the whole is always significant.
The word imagery is often used loosely to mean any vivid description, but it is worth being precise. Imagery is language that appeals to the senses to create a mental impression. It need not be figurative — a plainly literal description can be powerfully imagistic.
Key Definition: Imagery — language that evokes sensory experience (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell), creating mental impressions for the reader. Imagery may be literal or figurative.
| Type of imagery | Sense appealed to | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Visual | Sight | The most common; colour, light, and shape |
| Auditory | Sound | Often reinforced by sound devices such as onomatopoeia |
| Tactile | Touch | Temperature and texture; powerful for conveying bodily states |
| Olfactory | Smell | Rare, and therefore often striking when used |
| Gustatory | Taste | Frequently linked to appetite, desire, or disgust |
| Kinaesthetic | Movement | Conveys energy, exhaustion, or physical effort |
When you analyse imagery, identify which sense is engaged and why that sense. A writer who reaches for smell or taste — the rarer senses — is usually doing so for a deliberate reason, because those senses carry strong associations with memory and visceral reaction.
A symbol is an object, character, figure, or colour used to represent an abstract idea or concept. Unlike metaphor, symbolism operates across an entire text rather than in a single moment.
Key Definition: Symbolism — the use of a concrete image or object to represent something beyond its literal meaning, often an abstract idea or theme.
Examples:
The key distinction is one of scale and recurrence. A metaphor is local: it operates in a phrase or line. A symbol accrues meaning through repetition across the whole text, so that the green light means more on its final appearance than on its first because the reader carries forward everything it has come to stand for. When you argue that something is symbolic, your evidence should be its pattern of appearances, not a single instance.
A semantic field is a group of words related by meaning. When a writer repeatedly draws vocabulary from a particular semantic field, it creates a cumulative effect.
Key Definition: Semantic field — a set of words grouped by meaning, relating to a particular subject or theme.
Example: In Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est," the semantic field of sickness, exhaustion, and physical breakdown — "bent double," "knock-kneed," "coughing," "lame," "blind," "drunk with fatigue," "trudge" — transforms soldiers from heroes into victims. The men are described not in the language of military glory but of physical collapse, and the cumulative weight of these words enacts the exhaustion they describe before any argument is made explicit.
| Semantic Field | Effect |
|---|---|
| War/violence | Creates tension, danger, aggression |
| Nature/pastoral | Suggests innocence, beauty, cyclical change |
| Religion/sacred | Elevates, sanctifies, or questions through irony |
| Disease/decay | Implies corruption, moral or physical deterioration |
| Light/dark | Establishes moral contrast, hope vs despair |
The analytical value of identifying a semantic field is that it lets you discuss pattern rather than isolated words. Instead of analysing "coughing" and then "lame" and then "trudge" as separate features, you can argue that Owen sustains a single field of bodily breakdown that systematically dismantles the heroic register the poem's Latin title invokes — which is a far more economical and powerful point.
Language is not only meaning; it is sound. The texture of words on the tongue and in the ear is a resource writers exploit constantly, and attending to it is a mark of sophisticated analysis. The key sound devices are worth knowing precisely, and — as ever — naming them is never the analysis; explaining their effect is.
| Device | Definition | Typical effect |
|---|---|---|
| Alliteration | Repetition of initial consonant sounds | Binds words together; can emphasise, quicken, or (with harsh consonants) menace |
| Assonance | Repetition of vowel sounds within words | Creates internal music, often softening or slowing a line |
| Consonance | Repetition of consonant sounds (not only initial) | Knits a line together; can create harshness or density |
| Sibilance | Repetition of "s", "sh", "z" sounds | Whispering, secrecy, smoothness, or menace depending on context |
| Plosives | Hard "b", "d", "g", "p", "t", "k" sounds | Force, abruptness, aggression, percussive emphasis |
| Onomatopoeia | Words whose sound imitates their meaning | Makes description vivid and immediate; collapses the gap between word and thing |
The crucial concept that unites these devices is the idea that sound can reinforce sense. When the sound of a line works with its meaning, the effect is intensified; when it works against it, an interesting tension arises. A line describing peace rendered in soft, liquid consonants and long vowels has its meaning doubled by its music; a line describing violence rendered in clustered plosives has its meaning enacted on the ear.
Consider Tennyson's much-admired line from "The Princess":
The murmuring of innumerable bees.
A close reading of sound might observe:
When you analyse sound, the test of a strong point is always whether you can connect the specific sound to a specific meaning or feeling. "This creates a nice sound" is worthless; "the clustered plosives enact the violence of the blow" is analysis.
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