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Components of a Lyrical Essay

The Lyrical Essay

Inventive and dextrous* language


*Demonstrating neat skill, esp. with the hands. Mentally adroit; clever. Synonyms: adroit - deft - skillful - skilful - handy

Infinitesimal chests Race-car hearts Apple breath living a life of fusion and flame

The Lyrical Essay

A perceptible voice
Tone of voice: attitude toward the topic. I love March! vs: I just love March. Syntax: word order Diction: word choice Intensity Directness

The Lyrical Essay

Examples of voice
Consider the hummingbird for a long moment Deeper still. The peritoneum, pink and gleaming and membranous, bulges into the wound. I must confess that the priestliness of my profession has ever been impressed on me. I learned, though I couldnt comprehendindeed, I still cannot how incredibly far away they all were.

The Lyrical Essay

Metaphors
One holds the knife as one holds the bow of a cello or a tulip--by the stem. Their cataclysmic dying, brilliant supernovae that light up deathbeds which become nurseries for the next generation, are reproductions of the true event, like a movie filmed after the fact but true to every detail.

The Lyrical Essay

Extended metaphor
When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, Ive never been seized by it since. For some reason I always hid the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny. Read the 3rd paragraph: I used to be able to see [.] Searching, I couldnt spot one. I wandered downstream to force them to play their hand, but theyd crossed the creek and scattered. One show to a customer. These appearances catch at my throat; they are the free gifts, the bright coppers at the roots of trees.

--From the Opening to Seeing excerpt from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek


The Lyrical Essay

Unexpected Leaps
Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside. So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the endnot mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend.

The Lyrical Essay

Amazing long sentences


As [the stars] age, fires burning hotter and hotter, expanding to ever more gargantuan sizes, big enough to swallow thousands or even millions of Earths, they cook hydrogen into helium, helium into lithium, and so on down to iron, fatal iron. Iron is a poison for these heavenly bodies, building up like a cancer until they start to die: Giants engorging larger still until they burst, flinging raw matter out into the universe to form more stars, planets, comets, asteroids; smaller stars collapsing in on themselves, losing heat so slowly and painfully, dimming first to white dwarves, then black dwarves, then black holesgraves marking the stars passing with a rift in the fabric of reality, sucking in everything and keeping it there greedily as if hoping to re-form the dead star.
The Lyrical Essay

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