For example, “he lost his passport and his temper” or “I left my heart and my favorite scarf in Santa Fé” are two instances where the verb is used in both literal and figurative ways. How to use poetic devices A poem is first and foremost an expression of emotion. You must engage your feelings when you read a poem, read it loudly. What about producing words? Speech is fundamentally a motor activity, which evolved from gesture. We are moved to speak, and we literally move — our lips, our tongue, our lungs, our stomach muscles, and often even our hands — to express ourselves. If we can’t do it ourselves, we quote someone else’s words, instinctively and ritualistically associating poetry with the expression of emotion. Emotions can even change our body temperature in an instant like a switch inside, we can have warm to hot feelings, to a chill with goose bumps from our toes to our eyes.

Owen’s “Futility” questions how something as beautiful as life always loses to death. A combination of slant and perfect rhymes, the poem’s rhyme scheme reflects the uncertainty of soldiers' lives during the Great war. While the speaker does possess an admiration for life, he gradually begins to question its futile nature. This duality leaves the reader in two moods, savoring life but also questioning its meaning at the same time. 33. "Suppose", by E.E. Cummings As infants, we begin learning language in interaction with a caregiver, imitating the shapes of their mouth, and waving our arms and legs in excitement and frustration at the repetitive noises they make, until eventually we are able to imitate their sounds. Those sounds are accompanied by feelings, related most strongly to a desire to communicate beyond the boundaries of ourselves. Nobel Prize winning poet Derek Walcott offers advice and reassurance to anyone experiencing a breakup in his poem ‘Love After Love’. Encouraging the reader to return to themselves, the poem is a tonic in a world full of love poetry which expects us to hand ourselves over to lovers completely. 63. "I Love You" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox I love your lips when they’re wet with wine And red with a wild desire; I love your eyes when the lovelight lies Lit with a passionate fire. I love your arms when the warm white flesh Touches mine in a fond embrace; I love your hair when the strands enmesh Your kisses against my face. An intense poem relating to love, hurt, and pain. The poem talks about the situation where a person going through depression was not able to share his/her darkness with the person he/she loved. This communication gap lead to breakup between the two. We invite readers to share their thoughts and experiences with us. What emotions have been particularly challenging for you to express?

27. "Before You Came" by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Contrasting love with the beauty of nature helps to create an unbreakable bond between the two. This comparison helps illustrate Joy Harjo’s feelings for her lover in her marvelous poem, ‘For Keeps’. 31. "You Are the Penultimate Love of My Life" by Rebecca Hazelton The garden you plant and I plant is tunneled through by voles, the vowels we speak aren’t vows, but there’s something holding me here, for now, like your eyes, which I suppose are brown, after all.’ Enjambment can also be used to create tension and surprise as the story you’re telling through your poem twists and turns. 9. Epistrophe One of the most fascinating things about love is that it can come in so many different forms — platonic, passionate, or even patronizing. Margaret Atwood unflinchingly lays out some of these in her poem ‘Variations on the Word Love’. 5. "The More Loving One" by W.H. Auden Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time. There is a strong sense of longing in Pablo Neruda’s ‘Love Sonnet XI’, as our speaker confesses the thought of his love never leaves his mind, driving him to the point of distraction. Evocative and at times alarming, it's a love poem which perfectly treads the blurred line between romance and obsession. 43. "Your Feet" by Pablo Neruda

This link to emotion, as well as child-like speech, undoubtedly goes some way to explaining another popular idea about poetry: that it signals “madness”. Biopics of poets feed this stereotype by overwhelmingly choosing poets with mental illnesses as their subjects — for instance, Sylvia and Pandaemonium, portraits of Sylvia Plath and Samuel Taylor Coleridge respectively. Katherine Mansfield has been praised for her ability to simplify complex emotions through short stories and poetry. One of the more tranquil poems on this list, ‘Camomile Tea’ paints a picture of a couple who are calm and quiet and happy with the life they’ve made for themselves, highlighting the underrated joy that peaceful familiarity and comfort can bring in a relationship. 40. "Love Elegy in the Chinese Garden, with Koi" by Nathan McClain Because who hasn’t done that — Some blank verse uses internal rhyme, or words that rhyme within a line rather than at the end. Blank verse is a great way to add a poetic levity to writing that would otherwise read like prose. 6. Chiasmus You Are the Penultimate Love of My Life’ is an unorthodox love poem, focusing on the realities rather than the fantasies of being in love. Rebecca Hazelton isn’t writing about her soulmate, and she’s aware of that — but that doesn’t make the love they share any less special. 32. "Yours" by Daniel Hoffman I am yours as the summer air at evening is Possessed by the scent of linden blossoms, The poem is often viewed as a reflection of Plath’s early morning poetry-writing ritual in the months leading up to her death: she would wake, write poetry, and then spend the rest of the day employed in household chores.

20. "Married Love" by Guan Daosheng

Both writing and reading poetry, through their expression of feelings and words have highly therapeutic effects on the mind. The structure of a poem favours brevity yet the best poems also capture succinct detail, making them incredibly powerful in getting a message across to the reader. The didactic tone of “Desiderata” stems from the fact that it is a poem Max Ehrmann wrote to his daughter as a manifesto to living a happy life. In Latin, desiderata means ‘things that are desired’. The poet lays out the ground rules he believes one must live by to have an authentic, virtuous life. The protective nature of Ehrmann’s advice to his daughter has resonated with millions, resulting in the poem being regarded as a manual to a life well-lived. 15. "Leisure", by W. H. Davies One of Portugal’s greatest poets, Luís Vaz de Camões is known for his lyrical poetry and dramatic epics. ‘Love is a fire that burns unseen’ is an example of the former, reflecting his numerous turbulent love affairs and how each brought a complex fusion of pleasure and pain. 14. "Beautiful Signor" by Cyrus Cassells This is the endless wanderlust: dervish, yours is the April-upon-April love that kept me spinning even beyond your eventful arms toward the unsurpassed: Sometimes the words might be used together in a different way—“Never let a Fool Kiss You, or a Kiss Fool You”—or sometimes it may be the concepts of the idea that are presented in reflection—“My heart burned with anguish, and chilled was my body when I heard of his death”—with “heart” and “body” as parallels bookending the contrasting ideas of “burned” and “chilled.”

There are two ways to begin working with poetic devices, both of them essential: the first is to read. Read classic poetry, modern poetry, free verse, blank verse, poetry written by men and women of all walks of life. Look at ways other artists have used these poetic devices effectively, and see which moments in their work resonate with you the most. Then ask yourself why and what you can do to bring that light into your own poetry. One of the dark poems about emotions. It showcases the life of a depressed person and how he/she is dragging through it. Living a dual life, loss of hope, misery, hurt, pain, suffocation, and thoughts about death are the key components of this poem. Anne Bradstreet’s Puritan belief that marriage is a gift from God comes across strongly in ‘To My Dear and Loving Husband.’ Reading it through a modern lens, it’s easy to start the poem feeling a little skeptical; however, Bradstreet’s genuine gratitude and dedication to her husband soon manifests to make it a deeply moving assertion of true love. 7. "Always For The First Time" by André Breton There is a silk ladder unrolled across the ivy There is That leaning over the precipice Of the hopeless fusion of your presence and absence I have found the secret Of loving you Always for the first time Love’s Philosophy’, while a beautiful love poem, offers a much more logical take on romance than many of the other poems on our list. Percy Bysshe Shelley expresses to his lover that their love is as natural as a river meeting the ocean — but equally that all the beauties of nature are meaningless if he doesn’t have her. 57. "One Day I Wrote her Name (Sonnet 75)" by Edmund Spenser One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washed it away: Again I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tide, and made my pains his prey. The nostalgic tone of “Life is a Privilege'' makes one feel blessed to have the opportunity to live. Wilcox artfully describes all of life’s blessings (from the sun’s rays to the chance to chase our dreams). Serving as a bitter-sweet reminder of how short life is, the poem encourages the reader to leave no room for regret, and live out their heart's desires. 25. "Lines on a Skull", by Ravi ShankarIn Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, the bird in question is described as “perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door.” Some of the poem’s readers may recognize Pallas as a reference to Pallas Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom. This allusion shows that the narrator has a high respect for learning. 3. Anaphora A “mother tongue” is a native language, and “the press” is often used as a broad metonym for journalists. Some metonyms are no longer in use, and can be worked into poems to show setting and context—for instance, “hot ice” to mean stolen diamonds. 15. Motif Written by the great 13th-century Persian poet, "The Guest House" is a call for acceptance — one that is, unsurprisingly, often invoked in mindfulness circles. Rumi uses the metaphor of a guest house, likening it to the mind. Much like guests in a lodge, thoughts arrive in our head one after another— some making us happy, sad, and even uncomfortable. This poem serves as a reminder to not resist life’s painful thoughts, but to welcome them with warmth and good grace. 7. "from Milk and Honey", by Rupi Kaur Of particular interest is the role of mirror neurons. These brain cells fire when an action is observed or performed, and they tell us a lot about how we understand the actions of others. They suggest understanding comes from a mirroring or imitation that takes place in the brain but is acted out or felt in the body. Juxtaposition is contrast—comparing dark with light, heroes with villains, night with day, beauty with cruelty. “All’s fair in love and war” is a famous example of juxtaposition—the idea puts two normally conflicting concepts side by side to make us reconsider the relationship they have to each other.