Effective Use Of Metaphors In Frederick Douglas's Speech

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Frederick Douglass was a man of many talents. He strived to achieve what people would call the impossible, at least back then. Douglass was in fact an escaped slave who wanted to abolish slavery. His speech made national history in which he gave an emotional and sympathetic speech that thoroughly impacted his audience. He used multiple way in order to achieve this, like using metaphors, parallelism and antithesis. Douglass liked to use metaphor to emphasize his speech, not only did he use it for emphasis, he also used it for an emotional appeal. He states in this quote “They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As rivers so with nations.” Furthermore, Douglass …show more content…

In the quote “They {the Founding Fathers} were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny {government rule of absolute power}. With them, nothing was “settled” that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were “final:” not slavery and oppression.” he's saying that although the Founding Fathers were peace men but they wanted to take action, they wanted a revolution in where they tried to make things right. I believe that his speech made the wake up and realize that they needed to take action right away and stop slavery because white and black people are no different from each