ipl-logo

Figurative Language In Once More To The Lake

1105 Words5 Pages

Graves 1
Cody Graves
English 111, J05
December 6, 2014
Literary Analysis: E.B. White – Once More to the Lake, Final Draft
Memories
E.B. White, born in 1899, wrote children's books, essays, and was an editor. In
E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake”, White goes back to Maine Lake where his father had taken his family to camp every August. While at the Lake with his son, White reflects on his own childhood. This essay is profoundly powerful and relatable to many people as most experience some sort of get away from the city life and escape into the wild. White uses the dash, figurative language, cumulative sentences, flashbacks, sensory details, and extraordinary descriptive writing to show us the importance of time and the change, if there is …show more content…

White uses a tremendous amount of sensory detail in this essay, which allows us to feel, hear, taste, and see everything that White is remembering and/or experiencing again. “In the day time, in the hot mornings, these motors made a petulant, irritable sound at night, in the still evening when the afterglow lit the water, they whined about one’s ears like mosquitoes” (White 462). This quote is used to describe the motors and the sounds that they made at different times. He talks about these motors for the entirety of the paragraph, using sensory detail to practically make us hear what he hears. The use of these sensory details shows us that not only White’s experiences as they are happening with his son are vivid, but also how he can remember his own childhood so vividly.
White’s use of descriptive writing is an important element in this essay. If we try to read this essay with no kind of extended description of what is happening, the entire feel of the essay would be totally different. White’s style of writing is very descriptive, which goes along with the use of sensory details, but the descriptive writing in …show more content…

Some sort of descriptive writing follows every experience in the essay; nothing is left unexplained. “A school of minnows swam by, each minnow with its small individual shadow, doubling the attendance, so clear and sharp in the sunlight” (White 460). This quote shows that white doesn’t just stop when he explains the minnows fly by, he continues to explain what he sees. He describes his experiences intensely in his writing, making this essay very personal. With him describing the experiences so passionately, not only will he remember them like the way he is describing them, but the directly relate to past experiences. Things may change, but the memories remain the same.
E.B White’s “Once More to the Lake”, is a powerful and relatable essay. White uses the dash, figurative language, cumulative sentences, flashbacks, sensory details, and extraordinary descriptive writing to show us the importance of time and the change, if there is any, which it brings along. We can see, feel, taste, and White’s personal experiences through this essay.
Graves 5
Cohen, Samuel S. 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007.

Show More
Related

Greasy Lake Summary

544 Words | 3 Pages

“Greasy Lake” by T.C. Boyle follows a group of well read college students desperate to portray themselves as hardened badasses by drinking cheap alcohol and cruising around town till the break of dawn. On the third night of summer vacation, the boys fid themselves at Greasy Lake going toe to toe with a shady character they mistakenly identified as a friend. The ever-worsening situation results in the shady individual collapsing from a tire iron to the head, sending the group of boys into a destructive fervor. The boys narrowly escape persecution from a group of true greasers by plunging into the woods and waters of Greasy Lake where the narrator brushes shoulders with a water logged carcass and emerges changed by his experience. “Greasy Lake’s”

Read More

Imagery And Symbolism In Lee Maracle's Charlie

763 Words | 4 Pages

Mastery Assignment 2: Literary Analysis Essay Lee Maracle’s “Charlie” goes through multiple shifts in mood over the course of the story. These mood are ones of hope and excitement as Charlie and his classmates escape the residential school to fear of the unknown and melancholy as Charlie sets off alone for home ending with despair and insidiousness when Charlie finally succumbs to the elements . Lee highlights these shifts in mood with the use of imagery and symbolism in her descriptions of nature.

Read More

Florence Kelley Child Labor Speech Summary

901 Words | 4 Pages

Kelley’s diction adds a tone to the piece and allows her to get her message across with helping the reader understand more deeply . Kelley’s use of imagery, appeal to logic,

Read More

Language And Tone In Elizabeth Alexander's 'Nineteen'

1190 Words | 5 Pages

Alexander uses a multitude of tones ranging from boredom, concealment, justification, unrest, impurity, wisdom, to a striking realization. Each of these tones elicits a specific response in correspondence to Alexander’s youth. The opening tone of boredom is viewed when, “That Summer in Culpepper, all there was to eat was white: cauliflower, flounder, white sauce, white ice-cream” (lines 1-2). Alexander’s tone of boredom from the uneventful activity is clear, by using the visual sense of the color white, as there is not any type of variety or favor to life regardless of the season of summer being present. This contradiction of a colorful eventful season of summer to the white boring foods being consumed issues an immediate hook for the reader to engage with and it is critical to being the attention to the start of the poem.

Read More

The Glass Castle Jeanette Character Analysis

440 Words | 2 Pages

As we still have yet to fathom what my brother and I will become, I learn to understand the extraordinary sacrifices you and Dad have made to make sure that both me and my brother will succeed in a new world. Over the summer as I read the Glass Castle ,I realized how important determination truly was. Although you have faced hardships such as the death of both your parents, Jeanette, the author of the memoir, had a father who disappeared and a mother who lacked decency to feed her kids. Even though your parents were efficacious unlike Jeanette’s, you two were both determined to take control of your future. With a strong sense of determination to get out of dilapidated West Virginia like you had to from Greece, Jeanette states that, “I was

Read More

Rhetorical Analysis Of How It Feels To Be Colored Me

522 Words | 3 Pages

Skin Color Isn't A Tragedy In "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," from The Norton Reader, Zora Neale Hurston states her experiences with racism as she grew up from the stages of childhood to adulthood. Throughout the essay, Hurston explains how she sees the suffering of black people and how she has accepted her skin color. The author's key point is, although she had accepted her skin color, she still experienced racism around her. In this expressive essay that's developed by narration, Zora Neale Hurston demonstrates different experiences with a common meaning and effectively using imagery and literary devices to vividly narrate the essay.

Read More

Once More To The Lake E. B White Analysis

426 Words | 2 Pages

Since White’s son is staying at the camp for the first time, he had never witnessed what it was like previously when White himself was young. In one passage, White uses imagery to describe the type of boat motor he grew up with, and the type that his son is growing up. “They were one-cylinder and two-cylinder engines, and some were make-and-break, and some were jump-spark... My boy loved our rented outboard, and his great desire was to achieve single handed mastery over it,” to White’s son, the brand new outboard motors are a vast improvement to the one or two-cylinder engines that his father once used. Therefore the changes that

Read More

Analysis Of Thomas Cooley's The Norton Sampler: Short Review

938 Words | 4 Pages

In Chapter One of Thomas Cooley’s The Norton Sampler: Short Essays for Composition, the audience was exposed to several strategies recommended for reading pieces of literature. These strategies were divided into three segments: Previewing the Text, Reading Closely and Critically, and Responding to What You Read. Each segment contained a list of either advice or questions the reader could heed to while analyzing their given text. Later, the chapter exposed the audience to the four traditional types of writing utilized.

Read More

Rhetorical Analysis Of Once More To The Lake

1237 Words | 5 Pages

This trip changed White’s outlook on life, for he finally realized that mortality was closer than he imagined. He was no longer young, and watching his son mature only made this notion more real. One day, he will be only a memory to his son, just like his father is to him. White uses a variety of rhetorical devices to convey the message to his audience that life moves quickly, not stopping for anything, including emotionally-charged diction, imagery, and personification. White uses emotionally-charged diction as a form of pathos to convey his feelings about his past and explain trouble he is having with accepting his old age.

Read More

Duality In E. B. White's Once More To The Lake

468 Words | 2 Pages

“Once More to the Lake” is an essay about a father and son tradition of going to a lake in Maine. The author recreates the experiences he had as a kid with his own son. In E.B. White’s essay “Once More to the Lake”, the big concept is White is able to accept that he has come to the closer to death when he sees that his son is growing up. E.B White has acknowledged that he will not live forever and the end is near. Throughout his essay, White uses a lot of duality.

Read More

William Zinsser's Writing Style

419 Words | 2 Pages

In this short passage by William Zinsser, Zinsser used compare and contrast to inform the readers about his personal opinions of being a writer. Due to different understandings and opinions on how to be a good writer, Zinsser decided to use compare and contrast in order to present a clean and detailed differences to the reader about how different people’s writing style can vary. By doing this, it would be extremely helpful for the readers to distinguish the differences of each writing style, see the benefits and disadvantages, and ultimately gather enough information to decide which style fits them the best. At the panel with Dr. Brock, Zinsser gave the audience a broader view of different writing styles and how they contribute differently.

Read More

Essay On Invisibility Of Whiteness

1788 Words | 8 Pages

At the heart of whiteness studies is the invisibility of whiteness and white privilege (Ahmed, 2004). Whiteness is thought of as the hidden criterion to which every other race is measured against. Through the lens of whiteness, the “other” is seen as deviant (Ahmed, 2004). The invisibility of whiteness, however, is only from the perspective of those who are white (Matthews, 2012). To people who are not white, it is pervasive and blatant.

Read More

Robert Bridges Poem

366 Words | 2 Pages

All in all, the choices of words used in the poem by Robert Bridges describe the struggle of the birds to live during winter season and scientifically, migration will be the best way to ensure their survival. Therefore in this poem, Bridges choose certain words to reflect numerous sounds which are related to the process of migration so that this process can be successfully presented in the mind of the readers. Without even knowing its meaning, the words like ‘chide’ and ‘chatter’ will make a good sense to describe the noisy sound of the birds when they gather together before starting their journey. In line 32, the word ‘hush’ highlights /ʃ/ sound which represents the state of the birds as being silent. Besides, the use of lexical onomatopoeia

Read More

Literary Devices In Tangerine, By Edward Bloor

1143 Words | 5 Pages

Throughout the entire novel, the author’s use of literary devices is very clear. These literary devices, specifically similes and personification, help the reader get a better idea of the exact sounds and feelings which will allow them to know what it feels like to be there in that moment. “ I stood there, trying to think of a comeback, when suddenly, I heard a whooshing sound, like the sound you get when you open a vacuum-sealed can of peanuts. Then the brown water that had puddled up all over the field began to move. It began to run toward the back portables, like someone pulled the plug out of a giant bathtub.

Read More

The Tell Tale Heart Rationale Diary

1247 Words | 5 Pages

Rationale: For this task, I created a diary because I think that this style of writing would be an extremely effective way to show another major character’s emotions and ideas, as it can be written from a first person perspective, giving a huge amount of insight. I based my task on a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, titled “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I chose this piece as it gives the opportunity to be very creative in my writing, but also introduces various constraints, such as writing in a similar style to Poe, and trying to avoid any plot holes. This task specifically relates to part 4 of the language and literature course, being; literature, as the stimulus text is a piece of literature, as is my piece of writing.

Read More

More about Figurative Language In Once More To The Lake

Related Topics

Open Document