Sea Shore Rhetorical Techniques
“that suggesting, dividing line, contact, junction, the solid marrying the liquid”
Personification
“that curious, lurking something… which means far more than its mere first sight”
Nature contains deeper spiritual meaning.
“How strong, vital, enduring! how dumbly eloquent!”
Personification
“Go and sit in a grove or woods, with one or more of those voiceless companions.”
Nature is a teacher.
“that curious, lurking something… blending the real and ideal, and each made portion of the other.”
Juxtaposition
“blending the real and ideal, and each made portion of the other.”
The physical world connects to spiritual truth.
“It is, yet says nothing.”
Paradox
“What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming.”
Nature represents authentic existence.
“This scene, this picture, I say, has risen before me at times for years.”
Repetition
“we have met and fused, even if only once, but enough — that we have really absorb’d each other and understand each other.”
Humans and nature are interconnected.
“the sane, slow-growing, perennial, real parts of character, books, friendship, marriage”
Diction
“those old dryad-reminiscences are quite as true as any, and profounder than most reminiscences we get.”
Spiritual truths exist beyond science and logic.
“with the ocean perpetually, grandly, rolling in upon it, with slow-measured sweep, with rustle and hiss and foam”
Polysyndeton
“the sea-shore should be an invisible influence, a pervading gauge and tally for me, in my composition.”
Nature shapes human thought and creativity.
“In the revealings of such light, such exceptional hour, such mood, one does not wonder at the old story fables, (indeed, why fables?)”
Rhetorical Question
“What more general malady pervades each and all of us… than a morbid trouble about seems… and no trouble at all… about the sane, slow-growing, perennial, real parts of character”
True value comes from inner growth, not appearances.
“Hours, days, in my Long Island youth and early manhood, I haunted the shores of Rockaway or Coney island”
Asyndeton
“Sometimes I wake at night and can hear and see it plainly.”
Nature deeply affects the individual spirit and imagination.
“the solid bark, the expression of harmless impassiveness, with many a bulge and gnarl unreck’d before.”
Accumulation
“strength, which after all is perhaps the last, completest, highest beauty.”
Nature reveals universal spiritual truth.