ShmoopTube

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Here’s your shmoop du jour, brought to you by Mysterious Priests.

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There’s nothing like wearing a dark robe to make you look shady.

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What literary device is demonstrated in lines 8–10? And here are the potential answers…

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We’ve got another literary device question here…

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It’s asking us what method the author decided to use in lines 8 through 10 in order to evoke

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some mental or emotional reaction from the reader.

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Be careful… there may be a madness to his method…

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Let’s look at lines 8 through 10:

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What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

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What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

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Before we even begin to think about literary devices, one thing should leap out at us immediately,

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like some creepy guy hiding in a bush.

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Every sentence starts with the word “what.” What? Why?

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Well, it just so happens that there’s a name for a rhetorical device where a word

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or group of words is used to start a bunch of sentences in a row…

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“Anaphora.”

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Which is option C. And as long as we were familiar with the term… this question is a cinch.

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But… let’s go ahead and see why we can rule out the other answer choices…

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There’s no reference to famous people or historical events, so there’s definitely no allusion here…

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An allegory is like a fable…

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and it’s tough to communicate an entire fable or parable in just 3 lines of poetry.

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Aesop tried and failed. He got horrendous grades in his poetry class…

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Nothing is being referred to by the name of something associated with it… so metonymy is a “no”…

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…and nothing is being compared in a symbolic way, so E is out as well.

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So yeah – C, anaphora, is the best answer.

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The best solution. The best choice. The best option.

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We just anaphora’d you and you didn’t even notice.

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