Synechdoche


a form of metaphor which in mentioning a part signifies the whole. For example, we refer to “foot soldiers” for infantry and “field hands” for manual laborers who work in agriculture.


A Nameless Grave
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


“A soldier of the Union mustered out,”
Is the inscription on an unknown grave
At Newport News, beside the salt-sea wave,
Nameless and daeless; sentinel or scout
Shot down in skirmish, or disastrous rout
Of battle, when the loud artillery drave
Its iron wedges through the ranks of brave
And doomed battalions, storming of the redoubt.
Thou unknown hero sleeping by the sea
In thy forgotten grave! With secret shame
I feel my pulses beat, my forehead burn,
When I remember thou hast given for me
All that thou hadst, thy life, thy very name,
And I can give thee nothing in return.


In Henry Wordsworth Longfellow’s poem “A Nameless Grave”, Longfellow uses the literary device of synecdoche. In the line “I feel my pulses beat, my forehead burn” he uses the words “pulses” and “beat” to refer to his heart. By using the synecdoche, Longfellow is able to relate to the reader’s sense of touch, the reader is able to feel the narrator’s heart beat.

Link: Schenectady




"However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure."

~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

         Henry Wadsworth-Longfellow was a powerful figure in the cultural life of nineteenth century America. Born in 1807, he had become a national literary figure by the 1850s and a world-famous personality by the time of his death in 1882 
         Henry's grandfather, Peleg Wadsworth (1748-1829), was a Revolutionary War general who later served seven terms in the United States Congress. The family home in Portland was built for Peleg in 1785-6. 
         Father Stephen Longfellow (1776-1849) was a lawyer and legislator who helped found many of Maine's early cultural institutions, including the Maine Historical Society (1822). Henry's mother and early encourager was Zilpah Wadsworth Longfellow (1778-1851), direct descendant of Plymouth's John and Priscilla Alden, and a woman of learning, wit, and liberal religious convictions. 
         Longfellow attended Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, where he met Nathaniel Hawthorne, his lifelong friend and literary colleague. After graduation in 1825 and three years of touring and study in Europe, he assumed the professorship of modern languages — then a relatively new field — at Bowdoin. 
         His publishing record (six foreign language textbooks in as many years) finally earned him a similar post at Harvard in 1834, beginning his long association with the city of Cambridge. 
         Longfellow was a devoted husband and father with a keen feeling for the pleasures of home. But his marriages ended in sadness and tragedy — the first to Mary Potter, of Portland, who died in 1835; the second to Fanny Appleton — the great love of his life and the mother of his six children — who died of burns from a terrible accident in 1861.

(http://www.poemhunter.com/henry-wadsworth-longfellow/biography/)