Previous
Genre
Definition of Hyperbole
Hyperbole is a figure of speech in which a writer or speaker exaggerates for the sake of emphasis. Hyperbolic statements are usually quite obvious exaggerations intended to emphasize a point... read full definition
Hyperbole is a figure of speech in which a writer or speaker exaggerates for the sake of emphasis. Hyperbolic statements are usually quite obvious exaggerations... read full definition
Hyperbole is a figure of speech in which a writer or speaker exaggerates for the sake of emphasis. Hyperbolic statements... read full definition
Book V: Proem
Explanation and Analysis—Right Now is Wrong:
In the Proem to Book V, the most directly political section of The Faerie Queene, Spenser uses hyperbole to satirize what he believes to be the impoverished values and priorities of his own day in comparison to those of the classical and medieval epochs. Of the comparison between his own era and the past, the narrator writes:
For that which all men then did vertue call,
Is now cald vice; and that which vice was hight,
Is now hight vertue, and so us’d of all:
Right now is wrong, and wrong that was is right,
As all things else in time are chaunged quight.
Ne wonder; for the heauens reuolution
Is wandred farre, from where it first was pight,
And so doe make contrarie constitution
Of all this lower world, toward his dissolution.
