Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" is an example: it begins with the line: "O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being!" and then continues to address the West Wind for the entirety of the 70 line poem. For instance, many poems that address people or inanimate objects begin and end with their subject-they don't turn to their subject from something else, because they only ever address that one subject. Most scholars, though, define apostrophe more broadly as being any "exclamation," or impassioned outcry, in which a speaker directly addresses an absent or silent object directly. "Grim death, how foul and loathsome is thine image!" For example, in the induction of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, the Lord is speaking to his huntsmen then suddenly he breaks off to exclaim: This way of thinking about apostrophe is based in theater, where a character onstage would literally turn away from the other characters when issuing an apostrophe. Though everyone agrees that apostrophe is a form of address to a silent listener, some scholars insist that apostrophe must involve what they call an "aversion," a turning away from an original audience to then address the subject of the apostrophe. But knowing the basics of the debates can help you understand apostrophe, and can also help you understand why some definitions of apostrophe on the Internet seem to define it in different ways. These debates, like lots of scholarly debates, can be a bit technical.
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It's worth knowing that there is some debate among scholars about exactly what does and doesn't count as apostrophe. Here Stephen simply addresses life as it is, as something to be experienced, and not as something that itself has experiences, or feelings, or acts in any other way like a human.
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Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. For instance, in the example below from the end of James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce has his main character Stephen Dedalus address "Life," but without ascribing any human qualities to it:Īmen. However, though apostrophe often involves personification of inanimate objects or abstract ideas, it certainly doesn't always. Here, in addition to performing an apostrophe in which the speaker addresses the cliffs and islands, Wordsworth personifies those cliffs and islands by imagining them as capable of knowing someone. There was a Boy: ye knew him well, ye cliffs Take these two lines from William Wordsworth's "Prelude": The object, in other words, gets personified. In doing so, the speaker or writer will often impart to the object human characteristics.
#SONNET EXAMPLES BY STUDENTS ABOUT AN INANIMATE OBJECT HOW TO#
Here's how to pronounce apostrophe: uh- poss-truh-fee Apostrophe and PersonificationĪpostrophe often involves the speaker or writer addressing an inanimate object or abstract idea. Sometimes this address involves the word "you" or the more formal "thou." Other times the "you" is not included, as when the narrator of Herman Melville's story Bartleby, the Scrivenerends his tale with the despairing apostrophe: "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!" Apostrophe always addresses its object in the second person.Apostrophe appears most often in poetry and plays, though it can appear in prose literature as well.An apostrophe is often introduced by the exclamation "O," as when Juliet cries out: "O Romeo, Romeo, Wherefore art thou Romeo?".
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The word "apostrophe," which comes from ancient Greek, literally means "turning away," because to perform apostrophe on stage, an actor turns away from the scene to address an absent entity.Apostrophe, the figure of speech, should not be confused with apostrophe, the punctuation mark.Some additional key details about apostrophe: The entity being addressed can be an absent, dead, or imaginary person, but it can also be an inanimate object (like stars or the ocean), an abstract idea (like love or fate), or a being (such as a Muse or god). What is apostrophe? Here’s a quick and simple definition:Īpostrophe is a figure of speech in which a speaker directly addresses someone (or something) that is not present or cannot respond in reality.