A figure of speech in poetry is called as 'Alankara' by the Sanskrit writers on Poetics. There are two kinds of figure of speech, namely, figure of speech of sense and figure speech of word.

Meanings are given a sort of embellishment in the figures of speech of sense whereas words are given a sort of embellishment in the figures of speech of word.

Let us see for example this particular sentence:

Her face is beautiful like the Moon.

In the above sentence there is the figure of speech called 'Upama' or 'Simile'. The face of a lady is compared to the Moon. Here the face of the lady is called as the object of comparison whereas the Moon is called as the standard of comparison. The word 'like' is the word denoting the comparison. The word 'beautiful' is the common quality of the Moon and the face. All these four elements constitute the figure of speech called Simile.

You can see an embellished sense in the above example. In other words sense gets decorated and hence it is a figure of speech of sense. Figure of speech of word is a simple jugglery with letters or group of letters. Words get decorated in the figure of speech of word. Double Entendre or Paranomasia is an example of figure of speech of word. It is called as 'Slesha' in Sanskrit.