Poets often hope to have an emotional impact on readers and to write using language that will be remembered. In other words, they want readers to feel or respond in certain ways after they read a poem and to remember that response. To do this, they use literary devices, such as imagery, irony, and rhyme scheme. For instance, in the poem "Dulce et Decorum est," the poet Wilfred Owens tries to convey to the reader a feeling of horror at the violence suffered by soldiers in World War I, and he does this, in part, through imagery. Owen doesn't pull back but instead describes the effect of a mustard gas attack:
if you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs ...
These images, along with descriptions of weary soldiers who suffer fates that are anything but glorious, are meant to turn people away from glorifying war.
The title of the poem, which means "it is right and sweet (to die for your country)" uses the literary device of irony, or saying the opposite of what you mean, to highlight, that in reality, it is anything but "sweet" to die in the battlefield and probably not "right" either in a war that grew ever more pointless as time went on.
In a happier poem, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," William Wordsworth uses the image of thousands of daffodils dancing in a spring breeze to convey that the best things in life are those that money can't buy. He also uses rhyme to help us remember these happy daffodils in his poem:
"Ten thousand saw I at a glance/ Tossing their heads in a sprightly dance."
The rhyme (glance/dance) helps us recall these lines, in which the poet uses the literary technique of personification, or treating an animal or thing as a person, to help us see the many daffodils as if they were people dancing by the lake. At their best, these literary techniques get under our skins and into our souls, and these poems stick with us, altering our thoughts and moods.
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