The major literary devices, also called poetic devices, in ‘A Legend of the Northland’ by Phoebe Cary are a resonance which means repetition of vowel sounds, This appears in line 1: “Away, away… Another striking literary element pertains to the structure of the quatrain stanzas (four lines per stanza) that have no end punctuation.

Each line rolls to the other through enjambment. It works very well in most spots, although there are one or two places where the enjambment is clumsy, such as “Where a little woman was making cakes / And baking them on the hearth/And being faint from fasting…”. There is both an explicit speaker (“tell me a curious story”) and an explicit addressee (“yet you might learn”).

The rhyme scheme of the poem is alternate unrhymed lines with rhymed ones in an abebdefe, etc. pattern. The! major literary technique is sensory imagery that includes vision, taste and sound as Saint Peter (the technique of Biblical allusion) approaches the cottage and witnesses the baking of the cakes, then turns the woman into a woodpecker that can be heard tapping on a tree.