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Literature Glossary

Don’t be an oxymoron. Know your literary terms.

Over 200 literary terms, Shmooped to perfection.

Blazon

Definition:

A blazon is a poetic mode where the speaker uses literary devices like metaphor, simile, and hyperbole to describe his or her lover's totally hot bod.

Yep.

For example, in Thomas Campion's "There is a Garden in Her Face," the speaker compares his lover's eyes to angels and her eyebrows to bended bows—yep, as in bow-and-arrow bows.

Predictably, blazon was all the rage with those randy Elizabethans.

P.S. For a parody of the form, check out Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 130, which begins with "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun."