Symbol Analysis
Of all the scenes on the pot, the speaker gets most jazzed about this one. And we can’t really blame him. It looks like a wild party with attractive young people. He contrasts the perpetual excitement of the men and maidens with the experience of unfulfilled desire.
- Lines 5-10: The speaker uses a series of rhetorical questions as a he tries to explain what’s happening on the urn. These questions produce anaphora, where each sentence clause begins with the same word, "What."
- Line 17: Another example of apostrophe. This time, the speaker addresses the "Bold Lover" who is chasing the women.
- Lines 29-30: The speaker uses metonymy to link his "heart" to his feelings of being "high-sorrowful and cloy’d." Then he uses two examples of synecdoche to explain the downside of love. A "burning forehead" stands for a fever, and the "parching tongue" stands for thirst.