These ten study questions invite you to consider some of the functions of figurative language in the context of particular poems, essays, speeches, and other texts. You're asked to examine the various effects created (and meanings conveyed) by a variety of figures of speech. The tips following each passage direct you to articles and glossary entries that should help you understand the rhetorical concepts and the different ways they work.
- Identify and briefly explain the multiple metaphors in the third stanza of Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for death”:
We passed the School, where Children strove
TIP: See Metaphor.
At Recess in the Ring;
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain
We passed the Setting Sun-- - Explain how the following E.E. Cummings’ poem contains both a visual and a textual metaphor:
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TIP: See What Is a Metaphor? and Visual Metaphor.
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iness - Define the terms tenor and vehicle (as used by British rhetorician I.A. Richards), and point out how each is embodied in Ezra Pound's two-line poem “In a Station at the Metro”:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
TIP: See Metaphor, Tenor, and Vehicle.
Petals on a wet, black bough. - In chapter six of his book Analyzing Prose, contemporary rhetorician Richard Lanham offers the following sentences from the New Testament to illustrate the concept of tacit persuasion patterns:
The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.
Identify the rhetorical device (derived from the Greek letter X) common to all three of these examples, and briefly explain what Lanham means by characterizing this device as a tacit persuasion pattern.
Judge not, that ye be not judged.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
TIP: See The Crisscross Figure of Speech and Persuasion. - This famous line from President John Kennedy’s inaugural address--“And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country”--illustrates the related rhetorical figures of parison, antithesis, and chiasmus. Briefly, define each of these figures and discuss the effects created by them.
TIP: See The Inaugural Address of John F. Kennedy, Parison, Antithesis, and Chiasmus. - Discuss the effects created by antithesis and climax in the final paragraph of President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate we can not consecrate we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
TIP: See The Gettysburg Address, Reading Quiz on the Gettysburg Address, Antithesis, and Climax. - Briefly discuss the effects of paronomasia, oxymoron, simile, epizeuxis, and assonance in the following stanza from Dylan Thomas's villanelle "Do not go gentle into that good night":
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
TIP: See Pun, Oxymoron, Simile, Epizeuxis, and Assonance.
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. - By the end of the essay “Am I Blue?” Alice Walker has uncovered a fundamental human experience in the anguish and anger demonstrated by a horse that had lost its mate. Briefly, discuss how Walker conveys her thoughts and emotions through epiphora, diacope, polyptoton, and analogies.
Blue was like a crazed person. Blue was, to me, a crazed person. He galloped furiously, as if he were being ridden, around and around his five beautiful acres. He whinnied until he couldn’t. He tore at the ground with his hooves. He butted himself against his single shade tree. He looked always and always toward the road down which his partner had gone. And then, occasionally, when he came up for apples, or I took apples to him, he looked at me. It was a look so piercing, so full of grief, a look so human, that I almost laughed (I felt too sad to cry) to think there are people who do not know animals suffer. People like me who have forgotten, and daily forget, all that animals try to tell us. “Everything you do to us will happen to you; we are your teachers, as you are ours. We are one lesson” is essentially it, I think. There are those who have never once considered animals’ rights: those who have been taught that animals actually want to be used and abused by us, as small children “love” to be frightened, or women “love” to be mutilated and raped. . . . They are the great-grandchildren of those who honestly thought, because someone taught them this: “Women can’t think,” and ”niggers can’t faint.”
TIP: See Epiphora (and Epistrophe), Diacope, Polyptoton, and Sentence Variety in Alice Walker's "Am I Blue?"
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