We have studied four figures of speech and noticed that, according to the classification of Galperin, this figures relate to one and the same group: Lexical SDs and Ems, and Kukharenko's: Paradigmatic semasiology units.
Please, fulfill this task! Let's take a look at how metaphor, simile, metonymy, and personification show up in the following poem. But If you have forgotten how to distinguish a particular figure of speech from the others, you can find definition of each with examples below. (The poem is from http://www.piclits.com/lessonplans/metaphor_simile_personification.aspx)
The Writer
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how are spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.
—Richard Wilbur
Definitions
A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a comparison is made between two unlike things. For example:
A simile is an explicit comparison between two unlike things that uses "like," "as," "seems," or "resembles" to make the comparison. For example:
"I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high oe'r vales and hills."
Metonymy is a figure of speech in which some significant aspect or associated detail of an experience or object is used to represent the whole experience or object. It is always a comparison between whole and part, not two disparate wholes. For example:
"For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon the inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils."
—William Wordsworth, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"
Personification is a figure of speech that endows animals, ideas, abstractions, and inanimate objects with human characteristics. For example:
"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom friend of the maturing sun;"