Figurative Speech/Language comes in many forms:
Simile (Comparisons often with as or like): As smooth as silk, as fast as the wind, quick like a lightning bolt.
Metaphor (Implicit comparison without like or as): You’re such an airhead. It’s bursting with flavor.
Hyperbole (Exaggerating statement) In order to get my assignment done, I’ll have to burn the midnight oil.
Personification (Giving something a human quality) The sun smiled down on me…The leaves danced in the wind.
For example, common expressions such as “falling in love,” “racking our brains,” “hitting a sales target,” and “climbing the ladder of success” are all metaphors–the most pervasively used figure of speech. Likewise, we rely on similes when making explicit comparisons (”light as a feather”) and hyperbole to emphasize a point (”I’m starving!”).
Using original figures of speech in our writing is a way to convey meanings in fresh, unexpected ways. Figures of speech can help readers understand and stay interested in what we have to say.
USE OF COMMON SYMBOLISM/ Figurative language IN ENGLISH AND URDU POETRY.

Poetry states Johnson, “is a metrical composition”. It is the art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason and its essence is invention.

“By poetry”, says Macaulay, “we mean the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination, by the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colors”.

Poetry is “a momentary stay against confusion” (Robert Frost).

As poetry has developed over hundreds of years, certain symbolic meanings have attached themselves to such things as colors, places, times, and animals.

A list of these common symbols and their meanings follows.

• Sleep is often related to death. Dreams are linked to the future or fate.
• Seasons often represent ages: spring–youth, summer–prime of life, autumn–middle age, winter–old age or death.
• Water is sometimes linked to the idea of birth or purification.
• Colors are often linked to emotions: red–anger, blue–happiness, green–jealousy. They are also used to represent states of being: black–death or evil, white–purity or innocence, green–growth.
• Snakes and guns are often phallic; caves and underwater images often womb-like; nature imagery, in general, is often associated with the mother or the female.
• The cycle of natural growth–birth, degeneration, death–often suggests the cycle of love. For example, a poem may trace a rose from bud to bloom to withered vine.
• Animals have various associations: horse–phallic sexuality; doves, lambs, sleeping animals–peace; felines, birds of prey–dissension, war, danger; snakes, serpents–evil, phallic sexuality, fall from virtue, magic.
• Forests are often places of testing or challenge.
• Light–as the sun, the moon, stars, and candles–often symbolizes good, hope, freedom.
• Darkness is associated with evil, magic or the unknown.
• The moon has several associations. It is sometimes a feminine symbol, sometimes associated with madness, sometimes with resurrection.

Poetic Modes in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) in his prose-poem, “Anywhere out of this World,” where he writes, “Life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to switch beds. One would like to suffer in front of the stove, while another thinks he would get better by the window.” If the world is a hospital, then there’s only one escape from suffering; Baudelaire concludes this prose-poem by declaring that it doesn’t matter where one lives, as long as it “is out of this world.” Unfortunately, the speaker finds that he cannot escape the ugliness of the real world.