Common Examples of Hyperbole
- • I'm so hungry I could eat a horse!
- • This cat weighs a ton!
- • She's as big as a house.
Examples of Hyperbole in Poetry
"An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast;
But thirty thousand to the rest..."
Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress
"With eyes up-raised, as one inspired,
Pale Melancholy sat retired;
And from her wild sequestered seat,
In notes, by distance made more sweet,
Poured through the mellow horn her pensive soul;
And, dashing soft from rocks around,
Bubbling runnels joined the sound;
Through glades and glooms the mingled measure stole,
Or, o'er some haunted stream, with fond delay,
Round an holy calm diffusing,
Love of Peace, and lonely musing,
In hollow murmurs died away."
William Collins, The Passions, An Ode to Music
"Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Concord Hymn
Hyperbole in Shakespeare
"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No. This my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red."
William Shakespeare, Act II, Scene II of Macbeth
If thou dost slander her and torture me,
Never pray more;
abandon all remorse;
On horror’s head accumulate;
Do deeds to make heaven weep,
all earth amazed;
For nothing canst thou to damnation add
Greater than that.
William Shakespeare, Act III, Scene III of Othello