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In poetry words are not used literally; that is to say, they are not to be understood exactly in the usual manner: for example, when we say the "golden sun," we do not mean to say that the sun is made of gold. This mode of speaking is called figurative, or speaking in figures or tropes; the word trope being used by the best writers indiscriminately with figure, when inanimate substances are described, as if they were capable of action: when qualities are attributed to any thing which do not exactly belong to it, or when an adjective which is suited to one word is joined to another in a sentence, this manner of speaking, or writing, is called figurative, probably because qualities of the mind are in this manner changed into ideal figures or persons.

The words to speak truth are prose: the truth here means merely what is true; but he spoke with the voice of Truth is figurative, because Truth is here represented as a person that has a voice.

Not only a single word, but several words together, or a whole sentence, may be figurative; as, "The trembling Grove confessed its fright." In this line, not only every word, but all the sentiments, are figurative.

Figures of rhetorick are of various sorts, and have particular names, all of which are well described in the following passage from Blackwell, which I do not quote as necessary to be got by heart by my young readers, but that it may be referred to upon occasion :—

"There is a general analogy and relation between all tropes, and that in all of them, a man uses a foreign or strange word instead of a proper one, and therefore says one thing and means something different. When he says one thing and means another almost the same, it is a synecdoche. When he says one thing and means another mutually depending, it is a metonymy. When he says one thing and means another opposite or contrary, it is an irony. When he says one thing and means

another like it, it is a metaphor. A metaphor continued and often repeated, becomes an allegory. A metaphor carried to a great degree of boldness is an hyperbole; and when at first sound it seems a little harsh and shocking, and may be imagined to carry some impropriety, it is a catachresis,”

POETRY

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