How to Find Literary Devices in a Poem
Quick answer: How to find literary devices in a poem using three quick passes: sound, imagery and structure, plus the devices students most often miss in exams.
Find literary devices in a poem by making three separate passes: one listening for sound (alliteration, assonance, rhyme, rhythm), one looking for imagery and comparison (metaphor, simile, personification), and one examining structure (repetition, enjambment, caesura, the turn). Devices cluster where the poem's emotion peaks, so mark the lines that move you most and search there first.
Hunting for everything at once is why students miss things: the brain attending to metaphor does not hear alliteration. Splitting the search into passes takes three extra minutes and roughly doubles what you find. And remember that finding a device is the cheap half of the job; saying what it does is where the marks are.
The three-pass method
Give each pass its own question and its own pencil mark so your annotations stay legible.
Spotting comparisons fast
Similes announce themselves with 'like' or 'as', so scan for those words first. Metaphors hide better: look for verbs doing impossible things, since a metaphor usually lives in the verb. If the moon 'spills' light, the poet has quietly made it liquid; if grief 'gnaws', it has teeth. Personification is simply this pattern applied to the non-human, and it is often the emotional key to the poem, because what a speaker humanises is what they cannot stop thinking about.
A worked micro-example
Take these original lines: 'The fridge hums its one note all night long; / the house forgets us, room by room.' The sound pass catches the low hum of 'hums', 'one', 'long', assonance doing the droning for you. The image pass finds the house personified as something with memory, and losing it. The structure pass notices the semicolon's hard pause and the slowing repetition of 'room by room'. Three passes, three different devices, one shared effect: a home going quiet and strange. Your paragraph writes itself from those notes.
Devices students most often miss
Caesura goes unnoticed because punctuation feels invisible; yet a full stop in mid-line is one of poetry's loudest gestures. Sibilance gets lumped in with alliteration, losing its specific hiss. Anaphora, the repeated line-opening, is often seen but not named. And the volta, the turn of thought, is the single most valuable thing you can identify in any poem, because locating the turn means you have understood the poem's argument, not just its decoration.
What poets can take from this
- Read aloud for the sound pass; the eye skates over what the ear catches.
- Scan for 'like' and 'as' to net every simile in seconds.
- Check the verbs for hidden metaphors.
- Mark mid-line punctuation; caesura is the most-missed device in exams.
- Find the volta and your essay has its centre.
- Name fewer devices and explain each one's effect fully.
Try it yourself
Write six lines about a household appliance without naming it, hiding one simile, one personification and one deliberate caesura. Ask a friend to run the three passes on it.
Questions
What are the most common literary devices in poetry?
Metaphor, simile, personification, alliteration, imagery, repetition, enjambment and rhyme cover most of what you will meet. Learn those eight deeply before adding rarer terms.
What is the difference between a literary device and a poetic device?
Poetic devices are the subset tied to verse itself, metre, rhyme, enjambment, while literary devices include anything found in prose too, like metaphor and irony. In a poetry essay the distinction rarely matters; effect is what counts.
How many devices should I mention in an essay?
Three or four, each analysed properly, will outscore a list of ten. Examiners mark depth of comment, not length of inventory.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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