It’s a rhetorical device, sometimes incorporating metaphors or similes, that helps the user make a point they wouldn’t otherwise be able to. With an artistic license, writers have crafted complex, baffling, and often amusing hyperbolic statements that are, more often than not, not meant to be taken seriously. When it comes to the written word, hyperbole is pushed to its limit. If someone said, “I could sleep for 8 hours” rather than “day,” the impact of the statement is greatly decreased. But, they are used in order to make a larger point. For example, if someone says, “I could sleep for days” or “I’m starving.” These phrases, when analyzed, are obvious exaggerations of the truth. But, more often than not, hyperbole crops up in common speech without the speaker or listener noticing. Sometimes hyperbolic statements are obvious and, when used, strike the listener as unusual. In combination with the capitalization of these lines, as well as the exclamation points, the hyperbolic expressions in ‘Television’ seek to convince a child’s parents not to let their kid watch TV. For example, lines thirty-one through thirty-three: They range from a child’s brain-melting to losing the desire to understand the world. Dahl’s speaker uses hyperbolic statements to reflect on the dangers of watching too much TV. The poem describes in outrageous detail the dangers of television and what a parent can do to save their child. This poem speaks on themes of childhood and entertainment. One final example, in a very different piece of poetry, is ‘Television’ by Roald Dahl. She channels her mother’s experience, tapping into the misery of months without money or proper nourishment for her children. The phrase, “each month was weeks too long” helps the reader understand how desperate the speaker felt. In the fourth stanza, while speaking about the passage of time in combination with a lack of basic household goods, she says: Read more poetry from William Wordsworth.Īnother more recent example can be found in Isabel Dixon’s ‘Plenty.’ This poem is eight stanzas long and describes the relationships a speaker had while she was a child and how she interprets them now that she is an adult. He suggests that he would be content for five hundred years if he could spend them with the intended listener of ‘ A Character.’ The phrase “And I for five centuries right gladly would be” is a clear hyperbolic expression. Such an odd such a kind happy creature as he. Yet the Man would at once run away with your heart Īnd I for five centuries right gladly would be This picture from nature may seem to depart, Towards the end of the poem, after using several other poetic techniques, Wordsworth uses a hyperbolic statement in the third line of the last stanza: Let’s consider William Wordsworth’s ‘A Character.’ This five- stanza poem speaks on the moral character of a segment of mankind in relation to the feelings a speaker has for the intended listener. In this context, hyperbole is sometimes seen in definitions along with the word “ auxesis,” meaning “ growth.” This word is connected to rhetorical analysis and can refer to a number of different ways of growing an argument for example, a hyperbolic statement, a climax, or a repetition of arguments, known as amplification.Įxamples of Hyperbole in Literature A Character by William Wordsworth The former, rhetoric, is the art of persuasion that studies the capacity of a writer or speaker to persuade/motivate audiences. It is a device present in rhetoric, oratory, and poetry. The word “hyperbole” originates from the Ancient Greek ‘huperbolḗ’.
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