Apostrophe (rhetorical)

Apostrophe, in rhetoric, is the figure by which a speaker turns away from the audience — or from the subject at hand — and addresses instead an absent person, a dead person, an inanimate object, or an abstract idea. 'O Death, where is thy sting?' 'Ye stars!' 'Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour.' The effect is heightened emotion and an immediate widening of the scene: the audience is suddenly overhearing an intimate address rather than listening to a report.

The device is distinct from the punctuation mark of the same name, which marks contractions and possessives. The rhetorical apostrophe is old — Homer and the Psalms are full of it — and it is one of the standard resources of high-emotion speech and poetry, appearing in funeral orations, love poems, invocations, and prayers.

Apostrophe is closely related to personification (which gives an abstraction human qualities) but goes further: it addresses the abstraction directly. It is also related to invocation (a formal call to a muse or deity at the opening of an epic), which is a specialised subtype.

In modern prose the figure is high-risk. Used earnestly and without preparation it curdles into melodrama. Used well — with sufficient emotional buildup, and usually as a moment of climax rather than as a workaday device — it remains one of the most powerful ways to lift a sentence into the tone of a genuine cry.