AP English Literature and Composition 1.3 Passage Drill 4
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AP English Literature and Composition 1.3 Passage Drill 4. What literary device is demonstrated in lines 8–10?
| AP English Literature and Composition | Imagery and Figurative Language Passage Drill Passage Drill 4 |
| English | Imagery and Figurative Language |
| Language | English Language |
| Product Type | AP English Literature |
| Reading Literature | Analyze how an author draws on and transforms source material |
Transcript
some mental or emotional reaction from the reader.
Be careful… there may be a madness to his method…
Let’s look at lines 8 through 10:
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Before we even begin to think about literary devices, one thing should leap out at us immediately,
like some creepy guy hiding in a bush.
Every sentence starts with the word “what.” What? Why?
Well, it just so happens that there’s a name for a rhetorical device where a word
or group of words is used to start a bunch of sentences in a row…
“Anaphora.”
Which is option C. And as long as we were familiar with the term… this question is a cinch.
But… let’s go ahead and see why we can rule out the other answer choices…
There’s no reference to famous people or historical events, so there’s definitely no allusion here…
An allegory is like a fable…
and it’s tough to communicate an entire fable or parable in just 3 lines of poetry.
Aesop tried and failed. He got horrendous grades in his poetry class…
Nothing is being referred to by the name of something associated with it… so metonymy is a “no”…
…and nothing is being compared in a symbolic way, so E is out as well.
So yeah – C, anaphora, is the best answer.
The best solution. The best choice. The best option.
We just anaphora’d you and you didn’t even notice.