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Essay about Neutral Diction in Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

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The Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock, what a time of night! "The houses are haunted by white night-gowns." Everything is the same from one house to the next. Not only does Wallace Stevens hint at the Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock, he also brings forth feelings of loneliness and despair through his select use of neutral diction. Stevens emphasizes neutral diction using parallelism and repetition, the sameness of the syntax, and an ironic change in wording. Nevertheless, the emotion of the poem is only brought about by Stevens' specific use of neutral diction.

"None are green, or purple with green rings, or green with yellow rings, or yellow with blue rings." A common theme runs throughout this poem, which is linked together through the …show more content…

These feelings are reflected onto the reader, who in turn obtains the same emotions as the author, those of loneliness and despair for the situation.

In every poem, the diction an author chooses can drastically change the impression the reader acquires. Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock has proven itself to not be an exception. Likewise, the order the words are placed in can also alter a poem. Stevens was aware of this fact and so in his poem, he paid special attention to the syntax of his words. More specifically, the author used the sameness of the syntax to help get his point across to the reader. The majority of the sentences and lines in this poem are similarly structured. "...Or purple with green rings, or green with yellow rings..." In doing this, Stevens was able to show the emotions of loneliness and despair that he felt at this hour.

Syntax and parallelism also played a large part in the author's emphasis of his point. By piecing both of these things together, Stevens was able to provide the reader with an ironic change in wording for the last four lines of the poem. It is perhaps, these last four lines that are most important in the entire poem. Not only do they offer the reader juxtaposition between characters, but they also illustrate the author's loneliness and despair. "People are not going to dream of baboons and periwinkles. Only, here and there, an old sailor, drunk and asleep in his boots, catches tigers in red weather." The sudden change

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