Literary+Techniques

1. Name of term: hyperbole Definition: exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally Effect: Marianne Moore uses hyperboles in the poem //Peter// in order to make the cat appear much more vicious than it actually is. She is emphasizing the strength.

Strong and slippery, built for the midnight grass-party confronted by four cats, he sleeps his time away -- **the detached first claw on his foreleg which corresponds**
 * to the thumb, retracted to its tip; the small tuft of fronds **
 * or katydid legs above each eye, still numbering the units in each group; **
 * the shadbones regularly set about his mouth, to droop or rise **


 * in unison like the porcupine’s quills -- motionless. He lets himself be flat- **
 * tened out by gravity, as it were a piece of seaweed tamed and weakened by **
 * exposure to the sun; compelled when extended, to lie **
 * stationary. Sleep is the result of his delusion that one must do as **
 * well as one can for oneself; sleep -- epitome of what is to **

**him as to the average person, the end of life.** Demonstrate on him how the lady caught the dangerous southern snake, placing a forked stick on either side of its innocuous neck; one need not try to stir him up; **his prune shaped head and alligator eyes are not a party to the** **joke.** Lifted and handled, he may be dangled like an eel or set

up on the forearm like a mouse; his eyes bisected by pupils of a pin’s width, are flickeringly exhibited, then covered up. May be? I should say, might have been; when he has been got the better of in a dream -- as in a fight with nature or with cats -- we all know it. Profound sleep is not with him, a fixed illusion. **Springing about with froglike ac-**


 * curacy, emitting jerky cries when taken in the hand, he is himself **
 * again; to sit caged by the rungs of a domestic chair would be unprofit- **
 * able -- human. What is the good hypocrisy? It **
 * is permissible to choose one’s employment, to abandon the wire nail, the **
 * roly-poly, when it shows signs of being no longer a pleas- **

**ure, to score the adjacent magazine with a double line of strokes.** He can talk, but insolently says nothing. What of it? When one is frank, one’s very presence is a compliment, that he is one of those who do not regard the published fact as a surrender. As for the disposition

invariably to affront, **an animal with claws wants to have to use**
 * them; that eel-like extension of trunk into tail is not an accident. To **
 * leap, to lengthen out, divide the air -- to purloin, the pursue. **
 * to tell the hen: fly over the fence, go into the wrong way -- in your perturba- **
 * tion -- this is life; to do less would be nothing but dishonesty. **

2. Name of Term: metaphor Definition: a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable Effect: In the poem Nevertheless, Marianne Moore compares a bunch of different animals. This was to get a perspective of a lot of different animals and to compare and contrast them.

that’s had a struggle; yet was, where the fragments met,
 * you’ve seen a strawberry **

**fish for the multitude of seeds.** What better food.
 * a hedgehog or a star- **

**than apple seeds** - the fruit within the fruit - locked in like counter-curved twin

**hazelnuts**? Frost that kills the little rubber- plant - **leaves of kok-sagyyz- stalks**, can’t

harm the roots; they still grow in frozen ground. Once where there was a **prickley-pear -**

leaf clinging to a barbed wire, a root shot down to grow in earth two feet below;

as **carrots** from **mandrakes** or a **ram’s-horn root** some- times. Victory won’t come

to me unless I go to it; a **grape tendril** ties a knot in knots till

knotted thirty times - so the **bound twig** that’s under- gone and over-gone, can’t stir

The weak overcomes its menance, the strong over- comes itself. What is there

like fortitude! What sap went through that little thread to make the **cherry red!** 3. Name of term- imagery Definition- visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work

Effect- Marianne uses imagery in her most famous poem, Poetry, to emphasize it. She wanted this poem to be very visual so the reader could feel as if they were actually there.

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine if it must, these things are important not because a
 * Hands that can grasp, eyes **
 * that can dilate, hair that can rise **

**high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them** but because they are useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand: **the bat**
 * holding on upside down or in quest of something to **


 * eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf **
 * under **
 * a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a **
 * flea, the base- **
 * ball fan, the statistician-- **
 * nor is it valid **
 * to discriminate against ‘business documents and **

**school-books’**; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the poets among us can be ‘literalists of  the imagination’--above insolence and triviality and can present

**for inspection, ‘imaginary gardens with read toads in them’**, shall we have it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, you are interested in poetry