Edgar Allan Poe Ligeia Rhetorical Devices

Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “Ligeia” has interesting examples for syntactical analysis. The diction and sentence structure in one particular paragraph reveals the narrator’s emotions and thought process. Parallelism and repetition of ideas provide further insight into the speaker’s mind. Lastly, a metaphor transforms an idea into tangible objects that add to the story’s imagery. Poe combines all of these key words, metaphors, and parallel sentences to explain the narrator’s naivety with Ligeia. Poe begins his explanation with these two sentences that reveal the speaker’s confusion: “There is no point, among the many incomprehensible anomalies of the science of mind, more thrillingly exciting than the fact —never, I believe, noticed in

While, the narrator struggles with this idea of Ligeia, the intensity of his will pushes him to the brink, the verge, the cusp of remembering, yet he, unfortunately, knows not what vague aspect Ligeia’s eyes dare to reveal. These sentences owe their dramatic and emotional appeal to their syntax. Both sentences are long, about 45 words. Long sentences pull the reader’s attention faster down the page looking for an end. Finally, the reader reaches the sentence’s end and slows down. In these sentences, Poe intentionally writes them ends to negate their beginnings. Poe writes that the narrator is about to know the secret of Ligeia, but then abruptly contradicts himself when he writes that the narrator was unable to remember. Poe does this twice in these parallel sentences. In the first sentence, the phrase, “We often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance” parallels the phr s,ease “I felt approaching the full knowledge of their expression,” in the second. Poe repeats this idea to emphasize the narrator’s inability to understand Ligeia. How could the narrator understand