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."