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The sentence He was less than sober means that he was completely drunk
(tenor). The sentence says less than is meant (understates the meaning).
The sentence I could kill him means that I am very angry with him (tenor). The
sentence says more than is meant (overstates the meaning).
Understatement is a stylistic device also used in everyday discourse, the
device of presenting something as less significant than it really is. We use the
term understatement when somebody says less than s/he means.
Gap-filling is a well-known form of grammatical drill: a word or a phrase in a
sentence is left out, and the student has to find it. When we read poetry we can
follow (and often unconsciously do follow) the same method. There are, however,
two differences: a) the poem is a complete text, consequently what you fill in
will be a part of your interpretation rather than the text itself; b) unlike a
grammatical test, the experience of reading poetry always implies numberless
solutions in filling the gaps in the text. Nevertheless, you keep on doing gapfilling when you want to interpret the understatements in a poem.
A metonymy is a figure in which the name of one object is used for another.
Personification is the description of an object or an idea as if it had human
characteristics.
Overstatement is the opposite of understatement: in a wider sense, we use the
term when somebody repeats the same meaning in various forms, or uses
stylistic effects that show something as more significant than it is commonly
known.
Whenever you intend to discuss poetry, always start with reading the poem for
pleasure; that is what poetry is meant for. Never start discussing a poem before
you have read it at least twice. You should feel the musical effects and observe
the pictorial elements before you analyse them. Then you can close-read all the
elements of the images and their relationship with each other or, to put it
another way: explore how the words of the text make a poem.