Методическое пособие по стилистике английского языка
учебно-методическое пособие по теме

ALLITERATION The repetition of consonant sounds in a group of words close together. Most often, alliteration comes at the beginning of words, although it can appear in the middle and at the end of words as well.

One important function of alliteration is to give special emphasis to the words alliterated. Our ear hears them as having special value. This is one reason why advertising jingles use alliteration frequently. Advertisers and politicians have discovered that alliteration helps people remember what they have said. Abraham Lincoln once alliterated the beginning, middle, and end of two words: "Among free men there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet."

Alliteration is most commonly used in poetry. An example of a heavily alliterated passage is this, from Ted Hughes's "The Lake":

Snuffles at my feet for what I might drop or kick up,                                                     Sucks and slobbers the stones, snorts through its lips.

Alliteration is found in many familiar expressions: “a dime a dozen”, “bigger and better”, “jump for joy”.

ALLUSION A reference to a work of literature or to a well known historical event, person, or place. The purpose of an allusion is to give us a fuller understanding of one thing by helping us to see it in comparison with something else we may know better.

Allusions to the Bible and to the works of Shakespeare are common because so many people have had exposure to both. Allusions to famous people and historical events are common for the same reason.

In older literature, allusion to Greek and Roman deities is common because classical literature was once basic to everyone's education. Apollo, when alluded to, implies the values of moderation, reason, and the arts. Dionysos implies passion and abandon, since he was associated with the use of wine. Aphrodite implies beauty, while her son, Eros, suggests love. Any allusion to these figures would carry a special meaning.

An allusion to the Ark would suggest the story of Noah and the Flood in the Bible. An allusion to Cain would suggest murder, since, according to Genesis, Cain was the first person to take another's life. An allusion to Jonah would suggest God's trial of Jonah who was swallowed by a whale but restored to the world of the living.

Historical events yield many sources of allusions. "Crossing the Rubicon," for example, refers to Julius Caesar's decision to defy Pompey by crossing the river that was to have been the limit of his territory. When he declared defiantly, but triumphantly, "Veni. Vidi. Vici.," Caesar gave us another source of allusion —his statement "I came. I saw. I conquered."

DICTION A writer’s choice of words. One of the prime ingredients of a writer’s style is words. An old song uses two forms of diction to show what difference words make:                                        

Show me the way to go home,                                                                                                                   I am tired and I want to go to bed…                                                                                        

Indicate the way to my habitual abode,                                                                                                     I am fatigued and I want to retire…

Writers use an informal diction to produce a natural-sounding easiness, as contemporary poet Mari Evans does in these opening lines from "When in Rome":

Mattie dear

the box is full ...

take

whatever you like

to eat . . .

Phyllis Wheatley, on the other hand, writing in the eighteenth century, used formal diction to produce a more "literary" effect, as in these lines from her poem written to the Earl of Dartmouth:

Should you, my lord, while you pursue my song                                                          Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,                                                 Whence flow these wishes for the common good,                                                              By feeling hearts alone best understood,                                                                         I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate                                                                    Was snatch'd from Afric's fancied happy seat…

EPITHET An adjective phrase used to set apart, describe, and characterize a person, place, or thing. Some of the most well-known epithets are from literature: "wine-dark sea," "ox-eyed Hera," "rosy-fingered Dawn." All of these are from Homer's Odyssey. But many popular expressions, such as "Catherine the Great" or "America the Beautiful," are also useful epithets.

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE Language that is used to describe one thing in terms of something else; language that is not intended to be taken literally. Figurative language is always helping us to see comparisons and relationships. For example, poets can make us see lips as cherries, the sun as the eye of heaven, the world as a stage, or a lake as a slurping monster. Figurative language is not literally true, but it contains a kind of imaginative truth. Robert Burns tells us, "my Love's like a red, red rose." We're fairly certain that his love does not have thorns, a green stem, and petals. But his figure of speech makes us think of all the ways the girl might be like a flower: fresh, soft, sweet, and maybe just as rosy.

Figurative language is also used in everyday conversation. For example, we might refer to someone as a "turkey." This is not suggesting that the person gobbles and would make a good meal; it is simply a way of insulting someone because turkeys are not very bright, nor very industrious. To say that someone is a "shrimp" does not mean that the person is an edible sea animal; it simply means, figuratively, that the person is rather small (as a shrimp is, compared with a whale).

Metaphor is the main form of figurative language. Metaphor is an identification of two things that can be directly stated ("My love is a red rose"), or that can be implied or suggested ("My love has a rosy bloom"). Neither of these descriptions is meant to be taken literally (no one is a rose, nor does anyone bloom and open petals). Each description is figurative.

Simile is a straightforward comparison of two unlike things, using a specific word of comparison (such as like, as, than etc). ("My love is like a red rose").

Personification is a special form of metaphor. In personification, an inanimate thing or an animal is given human qualities. Homer, writing centuries ago, described "rosy-fingered dawn," making us think of a woman with rosy fingers.

When Isabella Gardener in "Summer Remembered" speaks of the "quarreling of oarlocks," she is personifying the oarlocks as people. She is comparing the sounds made by the wooden oars to the noise of human argument.

A symbol is an object, a person, an action, or an event that stands for itself and for something more than itself as well. A common symbol in literature is night, which often stands for death. Another is spring, which often symbolizes rebirth.

FIGURE OF SPEECH Any expression that uses language figuratively, not literally. Metaphors, similes, personifications, and symbols are all figures of speech.

INVERSION The reversal of the usual order of words in a sentence. Emily Dickinson, in the first stanza of her poem "For Each Ecstatic Instant," inverts the normal order of the verb pay and of its object anguish. This inversion emphasizes the word anguish — what the poet feels we must pay for the intense moments we experience:

For each ecstatic instant                                                                        We must an anguish pay                                                                        In keen and quivering ratio                                                                  To the ecstasy.

Sometimes the inversion is used for technical reasons, that is, to make rhythms or rhymes work out. Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, in his poem "The Raven," almost certainly inverted words in the following sentence to get a rhyme for the word nevermore (which appears in a preceding line):

But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only                                                   That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.

 In the past, inversion was more common because poets worked under stricter metrical rules. Excessive inversion is often what makes those older poems sound artificial and old-fashioned today.

METAPHOR A comparison made between things which are basically dissimilar, with the intent of giving added meaning to one of them. Metaphor is one of the most important forms of figurative language. Gwendolyn Brooks uses a metaphor in the opening lines of her poem "The Ballad Rudolph Reed," when she says:

Rudolph Reed was oaken. His wife was oaken too.

This metaphor compares two people to oak trees. On one level, this metaphor suggests that Rudolf Reed and his wife are dark-skinned. But it suggests much more than this. Rudolph Reed and his wife also have the solidity and the strength of the oak tree.

Many metaphors are not directly stated implied, or suggested. An implied metaphor does not directly tell us that one thing is another different thing. When Walt Whitman exclaims, "Old age superbly rising!" he uses an implied metaphor. The word rising implies that he is comparing the onset of age with the rising of the sun. This is a particularly rich metaphor because it reverses our notion that age is a decline; according to this metaphor, old age is a new beginning.

An extended metaphor is a metaphor that is extended throughout a poem. In "She Sweeps with Many-Colored Brooms" by Emily Dickinson, the metaphor comparing the sunset to a housewife is extended throughout the entire poem.

A dead metaphor is a metaphor which has become so commonplace that it has lost its force, and we forget that it is not literally true. Some examples are the foot of a hill, the head of the class, and the eye of the needle.

PARALLELISM The repetition of words, phrases, or clauses that are similar in structure or in meaning. Parallelism is used extensively in the Psalms in the Bible, where the meaning of one statement is often repeated, in a different way, in the next. This example is from Psalm 34:

I will bless the Lord at all times:

His praise shall continually be in my mouth.

Several famous uses of parallelism are found in Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. In this sentence from the speech, the repetition of the subject and part of the verb emphasizes Lincoln's point and gives his words a stately rhythm:

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate —we cannot consecrate —we cannot hallow —this ground.

Christina Rossetti uses parallelism several times in this poem:

Song

Christina Rossetti

When I am dead, my dearest,

Sing no sad songs for me;

Plant thou no roses at my head,

Nor shady cypress tree:

Be the green grass above me

With showers and dewdrops wet;

And if thou wilt, remember,

And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,

I shall not feel the rain;

I shall not hear the nightingale

Sing on, as if in pain;

And dreaming through the twilight

That doth not rise nor set,

Haply I may remember,

And haply may forget.

PARAPHRASE A rewording of a text or of a passage from a text, often for the purpose of clarification or simplification. A paraphrase differs from a summary in that it may be as long as, or even longer than, the original text. While the paraphrase may help us to understand more clearly what happens in the passage at hand, it does so at the expense of style, or atmosphere, or ambiguity —effects that may have been an important part of the original work. For example, here is a poem by Emily Dickinson, and a paraphrase:

My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close

Emily Dickinson

My life closed twice before its close;                                                            It yet remains to see                                                                           If Immortality unveil                                                                           A third event to me,

So huge, so hopeless to conceive                                                                  As these that twice befell.                                                                    Parting is all we know of heaven,                                                               And all we need of hell.

I have felt as if I had died twice in my life, when I parted from a person I loved, and I am wondering whether my own death will reveal such deep emotions, impossible to put into words, as these previous "deaths" did. When we part from someone we love, our memory of why we loved them, of our happiness with them, can help us understand what paradise might be like; at the same time, our grief and pain at losing them makes us feel that we know what hell might be like.

The paraphrase might help someone who is reading the poem for the first time to understand what the poem "says," but it loses the impact and possibilities of meaning contained in the original..

PARODY The imitation of a piece of literature or music or art, for amusement or instruction. Literary parodies are ways of poking fun at the high seriousness of some writers and of some forms of literature. Parodies are also ways of poking fun at those who take the literature too seriously.

Dorothy Parker's poem "One Perfect Rose" opens with the kind of language used in some poems celebrating love. The parody begins when the poet shifts her tone and suggests that a limousine might be a better gift than a rose.

The more pronounced and distinct a style is, the easier it is to write a parody. "Sea Fever" by John Masefield is a case in point, as this parody of the opening lines suggests:

C Fever: Bringing Home the Report Card

I must go down to the living room, to face the music go I,                                            And all I ask is a feeble excuse and some luck to get me by,                                            And my mom is miffed and I can't speak up and my knees are shaking,                                    And a gray mist's on my dad's face, and my voice starts quaking.

PUN   A humorous play on words, using either (1) two or more different meanings of the same word, or (2) two or more words that are spelled and pronounced somewhat the same but have different meanings. William Shakespeare uses puns frequently. In his play Romeo and Juliet, a character named Mercutio, who is always joking, is fatally wounded and knows he does not have long to live. Punning on the word grave, Mercutio says, "Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man”.

In the following poem, Arthur Guiterman puns on words pause/paws and on the different meanings of the word bark:

Motto for a Dog House

Arthur Guiterman

I love this little house because

It offers, after dark,

  A pause for rest, a rest for paws,

A place to moor my bark.

In his story “The Storyteller” Saki (which is a pen name of a Scottish novelist Hector Hugh Munro) puns on the words hum/hummingbird: “There were lots of other delightful things in the park. There were ponds with gold and blue and green fish in them, and trees with beautiful parrots that said clever things at a moment’s notice, and hummingbirds that hummed all the popular tunes of the day.”

SIMILE A direct comparison made between two unlike things, using a word of comparison such as like, as, than, such as, or resembles. Similes are one of the most frequently used figures of speech; not only are they common in prose and poetry, but they are also used in everyday speech. When we say, "His grip was like a vise" or "Her memory was like a computer," we are using a simile. In her poem "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass," Emily Dickinson describes a snake with this homely simile: "The grass divides as with a comb." The simile compares the grass to hair and the snake's path to a part made by a comb. In these lines from his poem "A Youth Mowing," D. H. Lawrence uses a simile to describe the pride of a young boy:

And he sees me bringing the dinner, he lifts

His head as proud as a deer that looks

Shoulder-deep out of the corn

SYMBOL Something in a literary work which maintains its own meaning while at the same time standing for something broader than itself. When a symbol is used in literature, its "double nature" can make it very complex and sometimes difficult to recognize.

There are many common, "reusable" symbols — symbols used over and over again. For example, the rose is often used as a symbol of beauty and love; the west is often used as a symbol of death; the seasons are often used as symbols of the human "seasons" of birth, youth, maturity, and old age; the dove is often used as a symbol of peace; a journey is often used as a symbol of life itself.

Writers usually let us know through the context when they wish us to interpret something as a symbol. Once we recognize a symbol, its further meanings seem to radiate outward in our imagination like the ripples from a stone dropped in a deep well.