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Rhetorical Analysis Of Yeats ' Poem Essay

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Rhetorical Analysis:

“How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.”(Yeats, 1893).

This sentence is picked up from ‘When you are old’, a love poem written by an Irish poet called William Butler Yeats. Although he was tortured by the unrequited love, he still strongly expressed his admire to the only love of his life (Poetry foundation, 2016).

In the first line, the word ‘many’ tells the audience that her beauty was pursued by rivals. Whereas in the third line, the word ‘one’ emphasise Yeats’ unique love towards her passionate soul. By contrasting ‘many’ and ‘one’, it conveys that other men loved ‘your’ physical appearance and it is not true love. However, ‘I’ love ‘your’ intrinsic nature and everything about ‘you’. Yeats intended to use this poem to illustrate ‘I’ am the only one who loved ‘you’ for real. Furthermore, Yeats appeals to logic by using antithetical terms, ‘false’ and ‘true’, ‘beauty’ and ‘pilgrim soul’, ‘your moments of glad grace’ and ‘the sorrows of your changing face’, pointed out how difference his love is compared with other men.

Additionally, though ‘I’ is not using in the sentence, Yeats successfully interjected himself into this poem. The use of second person narrative creates a direct connection between the writer and the audience. In other words, it evoke pathos through putting the audience into the situation and

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