I'm suppose to know the answer but my stupid English class was being chaotic because there was a sub that I wasn't able to catch what the transferred epithet was in this following poem:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodil
Can you find the transferred epithet?
Transferred Epithet is a type of Hypallage:
Hypallage is a literary device that is the reversal of the syntactic relation of two words (as in "her beauty's face").
One kind of hypallage, also known as a transferred epithet, is the trope or rhetorical device in which a modifier, usually an adjective, is applied to the "wrong" word in the sentence. The word whose modifier is thus displaced can either be actually present in the sentence, or it can be implied logically. For example:
"The plowman homeward plods his weary way, / And leaves the world to darkness and to me" (Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard") — Weary way is a hypallage: it is the plowman, not the way, that is weary.
"restless night" — The night was not restless, but the person who was awake through it was.
"happy morning" — Mornings have no feelings, but the people who are awake through them do.
"female prison" — Prisons do not have genders, but the people who are inside them do.
Another explanation: In a transferred epithet (also known as hypallage; literally "echange") the adjective or adverb is transferred from the noun it logically belongs with, to another one which fits it grammatically but not logically. So in "dreamless night" , dreamless is a transferred epithet. The exact meaning of the sentence is "night when I (or whoever) slept without dreaming," since a night can't actually dream anyway.
And one more: A transferred epithet is an adjective modifying a noun which it cannot logically modify, yet which works because the metaphorical meaning remains clear:
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth of thieves and murderers. . . . --George Herbert
Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold/ A sheep hook . . . --John Milton
In an age of pressurized happiness, we sometimes grow insensitive to subtle joys.
The striking and unusual quality of the transferred epithet calls attention to it, and it can therefore be used to introduce emphatically an idea you plan to develop. The phrase will stay with the reader, so there is no need to repeat it, for that would make it too obviously rhetorical and even a little annoying. Thus, if you introduce the phrase, "diluted electricity," your subsequent development ought to return to more mundane synonyms, such as "low voltage," "brownouts," and so forth. It may be best to save your transferred epithet for a space near the conclusion of the discussion where it will be not only clearer (as a synonym for previously stated and clearly understandable terms) but more effective, as a kind of final, quintessential, and yet novel conceptualization of the issue. The reader will love it.
Having said all that, and being a relatively intelligent college graduate, I have no idea what phrase in that poem is a trasferred epithet.
Perhaps "my heart with pleasure fills" since a heart can't actually fill with pleasure.
"Lonely as a cloud", because clouds don't have feelings?
"Tossing their heads", "Waves beside them danced" because daffodils don't actually have "heads" and can't toss anything, and waves aren't capable of dance.
I understand all the ones noted above, but I'm not catching them in the poem.
Perhaps "inward eye" since eyes look outward.
Reply:i know what one is but I can't find one in the text.
It could be I wandered lonely as a cloud, because the cloud isn't lonely- the narrator, Wordsworth is.
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