For each of the passages printed below, identify the most dominant literary device.
1. Wilson and I are different species: he’s an early bird and I am a night owl. The problem is if I move him to his own cage, who will I get to clean up the droppings?
2. A woman came home to find her husband in the kitchen, shaking frantically with what looked like a wire running from his waist towards the electric kettle. Intending to jolt him away from the deadly current, she whacked him with a handy plank of wood by the back door, breaking his arm in two places. Till that moment he had been happily listening to his iPod.
3. Only the champion daisy trees were serene. After all, they were part of a rainforest already two thousand years old and scheduled for eternity, so they ignored the men and continued to rock the diamondbacks that slept in their arms. It took the river to persuade them that indeed the world was altered.
4. People moved slowly then. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.
5. “A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet-
One perfect rose.”
6. At night, he would watch a “single green light, minute and far away, that might have been at the end of a dock.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)
7. “A wealthy peasant marches
Weakly across a blazing glacier
As the stars in the cloudy sky
Glisten grimly.”
8. As the cave's roof collapsed, he was Jonah, swallowed up, and only his frantic scrabbling behind a wall of rock indicated that there was anyone still alive.
9. “Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step. . .”
Robert Frost, (“The Death of the Hired Man”)
10. “Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;“
- T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
1. Personification
2. Irony
3. Imagery
4. Atmosphere
5. Metaphor
6. Symbolism
7. Juxtaposition
8. Allusion
9. Alliteration
10. Simile