Extending this asyndetic pattern, White builds the paragraph to a climax through isocolon and chiasmus as he looks to the future:
In a week or two, all would be changed, all (or almost all) lost: the girl would wear makeup, the horse would wear gold, the ring would be painted, the bark would be clean for the feet of the horse, the girl's feet would be clean for the slippers that she'd wear.And finally, perhaps recalling his responsibility to preserve "unexpected items of . . . enchantment," he cries out (ecphonesis and epizeuxis): "All, all would be lost."
In admiring the balance achieved by the rider ("the positive pleasures of equilibrium under difficulties"), the narrator is himself unbalanced by a painful vision of mutability. Briefly, at the opening of the sixth paragraph, he attempts a reunion with the crowd ("As I watched with the others . . . "), but finds there neither comfort nor escape. He then makes an effort to redirect his vision, adopting the perspective of the young rider: "Everything in the hideous old building seemed to take the shape of a circle, conforming to the course of the horse." The parechesis here is not just musical ornamentation (as he observes in The Elements, "Style has no such separate entity") but a sort of aural metaphor--the conforming sounds articulating his vision. Likewise, the polysyndeton of the next sentence creates the circle he describes:
[Tlhen time itself began running in circles, and so the beginning was where the end was, and the two were the same, and one thing ran into the next and time went round and around and got nowhere.White's sense of time's circularity and his illusory identification with the girl are as intense and complete as the sensation of timelessness and the imagined transposition of father and son that he dramatizes in "Once More to the Lake." Here, however, the experience is momentary, less whimsical, more fearful from the start.
Though he has shared the girl's perspective, in a dizzying instant almost become her, he still maintains a sharp image of her aging and changing. In particular, he imagines her "in the center of the ring, on foot, wearing a conical hat"--thus echoing his descriptions in the first paragraph of the middle-aged woman (whom he presumes is the girl's mother), "caught in the treadmill of an afternoon." In this fashion, therefore, the essay itself becomes circular, with images recalled and moods recreated. With mixed tenderness and envy, White defines the girl's illusion: "[S]he believes she can go once round the ring, make one complete circuit, and at the end be exactly the same age as at the start." The commoratio in this sentence and the asyndeton in the next contribute to the gentle, almost reverential tone as the writer passes from protest to acceptance. Emotionally and rhetorically, he has mended a broken strap in mid-performance. The paragraph concludes on a whimsical note, as time is personified and the writer rejoins the crowd: "And then I slipped back into my trance, and time was circular again--time, pausing quietly with the rest of us, so as not to disturb the balance of a performer"--of a rider, of a writer. Softly the essay seems to be gliding to a close. Short, simple sentences mark the girl's departure: her "disappearance through the door" apparently signaling the end of this enchantment.
In the final paragraph, the writer--admitting that he has failed in his effort "to describe what is indescribable"--concludes his own performance. He apologizes, adopts a mock heroic stance, and compares himself to an acrobat, who also "must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him." But he is not quite finished. In the long penultimate sentence, heightened by anaphora and tricolon and pairings, echoing with circus images and alight with metaphors, he makes a last gallant effort to describe the indescribable:
Under the bright lights of the finished show, a performer need only reflect the electric candle power that is directed upon him; but in the dark and dirty old training rings and in the makeshift cages, whatever light is generated, whatever excitement, whatever beauty, must come from original sources--from internal fires of professional hunger and delight, from the exuberance and gravity of youth.
Likewise, as White has demonstrated throughout his essay, it is the romantic duty of the writer to find inspiration within so that he may create and not just copy. And what he creates must exist in the style of his performance as well as in the materials of his act. "Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life," White once observed in an interview; "they inform and shape life" (Plimpton and Crowther 79). In other words (those of the final line of "The Ring of Time"), "It is the difference between planetary light and the combustion of stars."
(R. F. Nordquist, 1999)Works Cited
Plimpton, George A., and Frank H. Crowther. "The Art of the Essay: "E. B. White." The Paris Review. 48 (Fall 1969): 65-88.
Strunk, William, and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1979.
White, E[lwyn] B[rooks]. "The Ring of Time." 1956. Rpt. The Essays of E. B. White. New York: Harper, 1979.
After reading this sample rhetorical analysis, try applying some of these strategies in a study of your own. See Discussion Questions for Rhetorical Analysis: Ten Topics for Review.
