Figurative Language Poems | Poetry in Figurative Language

Figurative language adds depth, creativity, and vivid imagery to poetry, allowing writers to express ideas in imaginative ways. These poetry in figurative language examples showcase how metaphors, similes, personification, and other devices enhance meaning, evoke emotion, and create striking mental images.

A selection highlighting figurative language poems demonstrates how poets transform ordinary experiences into extraordinary expressions. Each poem uses figurative techniques to capture feelings, tell stories, and engage readers, making it perfect for poetry enthusiasts, students, and writers looking to explore the power of creative language. These verses illustrate the artistry of figurative language and its ability to make poetry more vivid, memorable, and impactful.

Ode To A Nightingale

– John Keats

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,..
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,….
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow…
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;…
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

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Because I could not stop for death

– Emily Dickinson

He kindly stopped for me
The Carriage held but just Ourselves…
We passed the Setting Sun –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –

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Little Boy Blue

– Mother Goose

Little Boy Blue,
Come blow your horn,
The sheep’s in the meadow,
The cow’s in the corn.
But where is the boy
Who looks after the sheep?
He’s under a haystack,
Fast asleep.

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Daffodils

– W. W. Worth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,…
And dances with the daffodils.

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Sketch

– Carl Sandburg

The shadows of the ships
Rock on the crest
In the low blue lustre
Of the tardy and the soft inrolling tide.

A Long brown bar at the dip of the sky
Puts an arm of sand in the span of salt

The lucid and endless wrinkles
Draw in, lapse and withdraw
Wavelets crumble and white spent bubbles
Wasth on the floor of the beach

Rocking on the crest
In the low blue lustre
Are the shadows of the ships.

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Tartary

– Walter De La Mare

And in the evening lamps would shine,
Yellow as honey, red as wine,
Her bird-delighting, citron trees
In every purple vale!

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The Dawn’s Awake

– Otto Leland Bohann

The dawn’s awake!
A flash of smoldering flame and fire
Ignites the East Then, higher, higher,
Over all the sky so gray, forlorn,
The torch of gold is borne.

The Dawn’s awake!
The dawn of a thousand dreams and thrills
And music singing in the hills
A paean of eternal spring
Voices the new awakening

The Dawn’s awake!
Whispers of pent-up harmonies
With the mingled fragrance of the trees;
Faint snatches of half-forgotten song..
Fathers! torn and numb,..
The boon of light we craved awaited long
Has come, has come!

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Operating Room

– John Reed

Sunlight floods the shiny many-windowed place,
Coldly glainting on flawless steel under glass,
And blaring imperially on the spattered gules
Where kneeling men grunt as they swab the floor.

Startled eyes of nurses swish by noiselessly,
Orderlies with cropped heads swagger like murderers;
And three surgeons, robed and masked mysteriously,
Lounge gossiping of guts, and wihs it were lunch-time.

Beyond the porcelain door, screaming mounts crescendo
Case 4001 coming out of the ether,
Born again half a man, to spend his life in bed.

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All the world’s a stage

– William Shakespeare

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;…
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad…
second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

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Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

– Robert Frost

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,

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Patriot into traitor

– Robert Browning

It was roses, roses, all the way,
With myrtle mixed in my path like mad:
The house-roofs seemed to heave and sway,
The church-spires flames, such flags they had,
A year ago on this very day…
There’s nobody on the house-tops now–
Just a palsied few at the windows set

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Sailing to Byzantium

– W. B. Yeats

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal.

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Kubla Khan

– S. T. Coleridge

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail.

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