The devices in the preceding sections operate on language itself—on how it repeats, substitutes, compresses, arranges, and holds incompatible forces in the same frame. The devices in this section operate on something different: the relationship between the speaker and the entity being addressed. They are not primarily instruments of semantic or syntactic force but of rhetorical stance—ways of positioning the speaker in relation to an audience, a subject, or an invoked presence, and of using that positioning to generate effects that content alone cannot produce.
Who is being spoken to, and under what conditions, determines what can be said and how it will land. A poem that addresses a dead father directly—that speaks to him in the second person as though he were present—is doing something fundamentally different from a poem that speaks about him in the third person. The direct address does not simply vary the grammar; it changes the nature of the speech act, transforming description into confrontation, elegy into conversation, the recording of grief into its performance. Apostrophe turns to address something absent, dead, or incapable of response, and in turning produces the fiction of presence—the absent thing summoned into the rhetorical space the address creates. Invocation calls on a power or authority beyond the speaker, positioning the speaker as a vessel or conduit rather than an originating voice, the address establishing a hierarchy of authority that shapes everything the poem claims to know.
At its most extreme, direct address ruptures the frame between the poem and the world it circulates in entirely. The fourth wall—the imaginary boundary between performers and audience that Denis Diderot named in 1758 precisely by insisting it should never be broken—becomes the device’s target rather than its given condition. Richard III steps to the front of the stage to take the audience into his confidence before a word of the play’s action has been spoken, the fiction of that wall dissolved by the act of address, the witness made accomplice in the same gesture that opens the drama. The speaker does not simply implicate the reader; they step through the frame and stand beside them, and the relationship that address creates is no longer between a speaker and a subject but between two parties who now share the same side of what they have just watched dissolve.
These devices are not decorative variations of address. They are claims about the nature of the relationship between speaker and subject—about presence and absence, authority and supplication, the living and the dead—and the rhetorical force they generate is inseparable from those claims. To address the dead is to assert that address is possible; to invoke a muse or a god is to assert that the poem’s knowledge comes from somewhere beyond the speaker; to hold a second-person address across an entire poem is to make the reader occupy the position of the one being spoken to, implicating them in the poem’s argument whether they consent to that implication or not.
APOSTROPHE
Apostrophe is the rhetorical turn toward an absent, dead, or inanimate entity as though it were present and capable of receiving address. The speaker turns away from the primary audience—the reader, the listener, the implied witness of the poem—and addresses something that cannot respond: a dead person, an abstraction, a natural force, a nation, an art object, a god. By addressing the absent thing directly, the speaker generates the fiction of its presence—summons it into the rhetorical space the address creates—and everything the poem claims to know about it, everything it asserts in relation to it, is produced by and dependent on the maintenance of that fiction.
The device’s force is a function of the impossibility it refuses to acknowledge. A poem that speaks about the dead in the third person maintains the grammatical distance that death has imposed; a poem that speaks to the dead in the second person refuses that distance, collapsing it through the act of address regardless of whether address is possible. The apostrophe does not pretend that the absent thing can literally respond; it asserts that the relationship between speaker and addressee is one in which address is the appropriate speech act—that the dead father, the west wind, the nation, the urn deserves to be spoken to rather than spoken about, and that the speaker’s turning toward them is itself a claim about the nature of that relationship and the speaker’s position within it.
The term derives from the Greek ἀποστροφή (apostrophē), meaning a turning away. In classical rhetorical theory it refers specifically to the orator’s turn away from the primary audience to address a secondary one—a judge, a witness, an opponent, an absent party—the turn itself functioning as a rhetorical gesture that shifts the dynamic of the speech act and implicates the primary audience in the relationship the speaker establishes with the secondary addressee. Quintilian treats it as one of the most emotionally powerful figures available to the orator, precisely because the turn is visible—the audience watches the speaker turn away from them to address someone or something else, and that visibility makes the address a performance as well as a speech act. The primary audience is drawn into the relationship the apostrophe establishes, made witnesses to it, and implicated in it without being its direct object.
It carries forward through the classical epic tradition—the invocation of the Muse is a form of apostrophe, the poet turning from the audience to address the divine source of the poem’s knowledge—and into the lyric tradition, where it becomes one of the primary instruments of elegy, ode, and the poetry of loss. The Romantic poets make it a structural principle of the greater Romantic lyric, the ode form organized around the speaker’s address to a natural or transcendent entity that cannot respond, the impossibility of the response generating the poem’s entire emotional and intellectual argument. Shelley’s odes to the west wind and the skylark, Keats’s odes to the nightingale and the Grecian urn, are all built on apostrophe as their foundational rhetorical act.
CANONICAL EXAMPLE
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill: Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind (1820)
The apostrophe is declared in the first word and sustained across all five stanzas without wavering: O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being. The wind is addressed directly, in the second person, as an entity capable of receiving the address—and everything the poem claims to know about the wind, about destruction and preservation, about the seasonal logic of death and regeneration, is generated by and dependent on the maintenance of that fiction. Shelley does not describe the wind from outside; he addresses it from within the relationship the apostrophe creates, and that relationship is what makes the poem’s argument possible.
The address establishes the wind as simultaneously destroyer and preserver—the leaves driven like ghosts from an enchanter, the seeds carried to their cold graves where they will wait for spring. Neither quality alone would generate the poem’s argument; it is their irreconcilable coexistence in a single addressed entity that produces the claim Shelley needs to make about the relationship between death and regeneration, between the present moment of personal and political crisis and the possibility of renewal. By the fifth stanza, when the apostrophe turns fully personal—O Wind, if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?—the fiction of the wind’s presence and responsiveness has been maintained long enough that the question arrives as genuine address rather than rhetorical gesture. The wind cannot answer. The apostrophe has made the asking possible anyway, and in sustaining it the poem generates its entire argument about the poet’s relationship to natural and political force.
The poem was written in Florence in 1819, the year of Peterloo—cavalry charging a crowd of eighty thousand gathered to demand parliamentary reform, eleven killed, hundreds wounded—and the Six Acts that followed, which effectively criminalized public assembly and radical press. Shelley was in exile, separated from England and from any direct form of political address by geography, law, and the apparatus of a state that had made his kind of speech dangerous. The apostrophe to the west wind is not incidentally political; it is the form political speech takes when every other channel has been closed. The wind moves between England and wherever Shelley stands, carrying seeds the way pamphlets carry ideas, and the address to it is the only available speech act—the only form in which the poet can reach what he cannot reach directly, can speak to a force that moves through the world without being subject to the Six Acts, without being stoppable at a port or suppressible in a print shop. The apostrophe generates the fiction of the wind’s responsiveness because responsiveness is what the political moment has withdrawn from every human quarter.
MODERN EXAMPLE
America, forgive this apostrophe, I'm channeling Whitman— he says that his atoms are rushing through the veins of another revolution, he's quickly assimilating into phosphor dots, trying to form a sincere face—he is easing through our labyrinth with a new heart, pulsing in the cursors in a remote chat room at the first hint of the apocalypse—now the future is pixelating into his beard, his singing hushed: A million Trojan horses on the horizon are circling the skies— beware the dark dreams spinning above you, beware the dark dreams spinning above you.
— America, Forgive This, Systems (Hallucinations)
The apostrophe names itself in the act of making itself: America, forgive this / apostrophe. The turn toward the nation is declared and immediately submitted for pardon, the device folding back on itself in the same gesture that deploys it. That self-consciousness is not deflation but intensification—the acknowledged impossibility of the address does not dissolve it. The turn has been made. The fiction of America as an entity capable of receiving a petition, of forgiving, of being in a relationship with the speaker that makes address the appropriate speech act, has been generated, and the poem proceeds inside that fiction regardless of the concession that preceded it.
The apostrophe is doubled through the Whitman register. The speaker addresses America through the ghost of the poet who most famously addressed it, the dead voice channeled as a way of inheriting and extending the tradition of direct address to the nation. But what the doubling produces is not amplification—it is exposure of what the address has become. Whitman’s apostrophe to America was grounded in the body, in the confidence of a living voice turned toward a nation it believed it could reach. This apostrophe reaches through a mediated, degraded signal—phosphor dots, cursors, a remote chat room—the directness of the turn compromised by the apparatus through which it must travel.
The couplet is where the apostrophe’s impossibility becomes structural rather than acknowledged. Beware the dark dreams spinning above you arrives and then arrives again, identical, the address looping rather than closing. The turn toward America cannot complete itself because the channel is the problem—the same infrastructure that carries the address carries what the address is warning against, the apostrophe indistinguishable from the noise it moves through. The repetition is not emphasis. It is the device failing in the precise way the poem predicts it will fail, the turn toward America returning to itself, the address going nowhere because the apparatus has made everywhere the same place.
INVOCATION
Invocation is the address to a power or authority beyond the speaker, calling on that power to enable, authorize, or speak through the poem. Where apostrophe turns toward an absent entity and generates the fiction of its presence, invocation turns toward a source of knowledge or authority that the speaker explicitly acknowledges as exceeding their own capacity—and in that acknowledgment positions the speaker not as the originating voice of the poem but as its vessel or conduit. The invocation does not simply address a god or muse; it makes a claim about the nature of the poem’s knowledge, asserting that what follows comes from somewhere beyond the speaker and carries an authority the speaker alone could not generate.
The hierarchy the invocation establishes is the device’s primary rhetorical work. By opening with a supplication to a power greater than the speaker, the poem positions everything that follows as authorized by that power rather than merely asserted by the poet. The knowledge the poem claims to have—about the gods, about history, about the nature of things—is not the poet’s knowledge but the Muse’s, channeled through the poet as an instrument. This positioning is not false modesty; it is a claim about epistemology, about where knowledge comes from and what makes it trustworthy. The invocation frames how the reader receives what follows: not as one person’s opinion or observation but as something that has been given from a source capable of giving it.
The term derives from the Latin invocare, meaning to call upon or to call into. It enters formal rhetorical and poetic theory through the classical epic tradition, where the invocation of the Muse is a structural convention that opens the poem and establishes its generic identity as well as its epistemological claims. Homer’s invocations to the goddess at the openings of the Iliad and the Odyssey are the foundational instances: the poet does not sing, the goddess sings through the poet, and the distinction matters because the goddess was present at the events the poem describes in a way the poet was not. The invocation is a solution to the problem of historical knowledge—how can the poet know what happened at Troy, or what Odysseus suffered on his journey?—and the solution is the Muse, the divine presence whose knowledge is not limited by human temporal and spatial position.
Virgil inherits the formula and adapts it for the Aeneid, Dante inherits it from both Homer and Virgil and adapts it for the Christian cosmology of the Commedia, and Milton inherits it from all three and makes the adaptation most explicit—invoking a Heavenly Muse that is simultaneously the classical Muse and the Holy Spirit, the two traditions held in uneasy fusion by the address. By Milton’s time the invocation has become both a genuine supplication and a formal gesture acknowledging the tradition within which the poem positions itself, the two functions inseparable. In the modern period the invocation survives primarily as an ironic or parodic gesture, the classical formula deployed in a context that acknowledges the impossibility of the original claim while maintaining its rhetorical structure.
The survival of the invocation as irony is not merely a decline—it is the form’s honest reckoning with what has happened to the epistemological claim it once made. When Whitman opens Song of Myself without invoking anyone, when Eliot begins The Waste Land with a line from Petronius rather than a call to the Muse, the absence is the argument: the source of poetic knowledge is no longer available in the form the invocation assumed, and the poem that pretends otherwise is lying. The ironic invocation—the one that deploys the formula while acknowledging the impossibility—is at least honest about the gap. It keeps the gesture because the gesture still does rhetorical work, still positions the speaker in relation to an authority beyond themselves, still frames what follows as something other than mere personal opinion. What it cannot claim is that the authority is real. The invocation survives by becoming a quotation of itself, the form preserved while the claim it carried has been quietly set aside.
CANONICAL EXAMPLE
Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed, In the beginning how the heavens and earth Rose out of Chaos: or if Sion's hill Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flowed Fast by the oracle of God, I thence Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song, That with no middle flight intends to soar Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in prose or song; And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer Before all temples the upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for thou know'st; thou from the first Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread, Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast abyss, And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the height of this great argument I may assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men.
— John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I (1667)
The invocation does three things simultaneously that establish it as the most theoretically complete instance of the device in the English tradition. It positions the speaker as vessel—Sing, Heavenly Muse—the imperative addressed to the Muse rather than the reader, the poet’s own voice subordinated to the divine source from the first word of the poem’s argument. It establishes the epistemological claim—thou know’st; thou from the first / Wast present—the Muse’s authority grounded in her presence at the events the poem will describe, a presence the poet cannot claim and does not pretend to. And it measures the poem’s ambition against the tradition the Muse has previously authorized—things unattempted yet in prose or song—the invocation not only calling for what follows but situating it against everything that preceded it, from Moses on Sinai to the Aonian mount of classical epic.
The fusion of the classical Muse and the Holy Spirit—and chiefly thou, O Spirit—is the invocation’s most argumentatively complex gesture. Milton cannot simply invoke Homer’s Muse because his poem’s subject exceeds what the classical Muse can authorize; the fall of man, the justification of God’s ways, the entire Christian cosmological argument requires a source of knowledge that was present not merely at Troy or on Odysseus’s voyage but at the creation itself, brooding dove-like on the vast abyss before the world existed. The invocation’s shift from Heavenly Muse to Spirit is a shift in epistemological claim: not the knowledge of what happened at a particular historical moment, but the knowledge of what was before history began. The poet who needs to justify the ways of God to men requires a Muse who was present before men existed, and the invocation is where that requirement is named and the authority to meet it is sought.
MODERN EXAMPLE
Of gamelans and pictograms I sing, of satellites with gossamer fins arrayed with Apollo's flaxen rings! With ancient hearts and minds, contained herein: may you accept this interstellar ark which cut the vacuum with its ivory nose and bore its noble calyx to the dark, a billion nights of spinning in repose until it fell upon your alien shore. Of the Brandenburg and glorious Fifth I sing, Queen of the Night and Morning Star! Like dew, you must shake the stardust from our lips— O Melancholy Blues, O Devil Bird! We're resurrected with each passing word.
— Kurt Waldheim’s Lost Preamble, Systems (Hallucinations)
Of gamelans and pictograms I sing echoes the Aeneid‘s opening gesture—arma virumque cano—the subject announced before the verb, the I sing declaring both what is being sung and the authority to sing it. The Virgil epigraph has already established the ideological register: sic itur ad astra, thus you shall go to the stars, the stars as destination earned by civilization’s advance. That the speaker is Kurt Waldheim—Secretary-General of the United Nations, voice on the Voyager Golden Record, former Nazi intelligence officer in the Balkans—is information the poem withholds from its own speaker while giving it fully to the reader. Waldheim performs the invocation at full volume, inhabiting the epic tradition without irony, and the poem never punctures the performance. The bombast is the instrument; what the reader hears in the invocation and what Waldheim hears are not the same thing.
The device’s hierarchical logic—the speaker as vessel for an authority beyond themselves—holds throughout, but what it is a vessel for has been quietly inverted. The Muse that flows through the classical invocation carries divine knowledge; what flows through Waldheim is the institutional authority of an organization whose founding purpose was to prevent the kind of atrocity he participated in. The Golden Record is genuine in its cosmic ambition—a billion nights of spinning in repose, the interstellar ark bearing its calyx to an alien shore—and Waldheim’s invocation of that ambition is not false in its enthusiasm. The poem’s irony comes not from his insincerity but from his sincerity: a man who can invoke humanity’s highest aspirations with complete conviction while the record of what he did in the Balkans remains concealed is not a hypocrite in the ordinary sense but something the ordinary framework of hypocrisy cannot account for—a consciousness in which the two registers have never registered each other’s existence, the aspiration and the atrocity running on separate tracks, neither one audible to the other.
The catalog encodes what the preamble cannot say. The Queen of the Night aria is listed by its respectable title; its actual subtitle is Hell’s Vengeance Boils in My Heart. The Devil Bird is listed as a field recording; its folk name across multiple cultures marks it as an omen of something that should not be there. Both arrive at full volume inside the invocation’s enthusiasm, the speaker delighted by his own catalog, entirely unaware that the catalog is speaking on two frequencies simultaneously. We’re resurrected with each passing word closes the invocation by making its authority collective—not Waldheim but humanity, the we folding the guilty into the innocent, the delegate into the species, the voice into the record. The classical invocation opens by subordinating the poet to a source of authority beyond themselves; this one closes by subordinating the speaker to a humanity that cannot disown him, the two traveling together at 38,000 miles per hour, the cosmos receiving both without being able to sort them.
PROSOPOPOEIA
Prosopopoeia is the rhetorical act of giving voice to an absent, dead, or imaginary figure—speaking as them, or giving them speech, so that what could only be described from outside becomes accessible from within. Where apostrophe turns toward an absent entity and generates the fiction of its presence, prosopopoeia goes further: it does not merely address the absent figure but inhabits them, the speaker dissolving into the persona and the persona’s voice becoming the poem’s governing instrument. The device does not describe a consciousness; it performs one, and everything the poem claims to know about the figure it inhabits is generated by and dependent on the completeness of that performance.
The mechanism is one of productive displacement. The poet’s own voice—their perspective, their historical position, their emotional investment in the material—is set aside in favor of the figure being inhabited, and what replaces it is a constructed subjectivity that must be internally coherent, historically plausible, and sufficiently distinct from the poet’s own register to be believed as another consciousness. That distinction is the device’s primary demand and its primary risk. A prosopopoeia in which the poet’s voice bleeds through the persona, in which the historical figure speaks in the cadences and preoccupations of the person who invented them, has failed at the level of its foundational claim—the persona must be fully inhabited, the poet’s own presence dissolved completely into the voice that replaces it.
The term derives from the Greek πρόσωπον (prósopon), meaning face, and ποιεῖν (poiéin), meaning to make—literally, the making of a face, the construction of a presence where none exists. It descends through the classical tradition of ēthopoeia—the rhetorical exercise of crafting another’s character in speech, used in training orators to argue from perspectives not their own—and into Ovid’s Heroides, where mythological and historical women are given interior voice in the epistolary form, their grief and grievance rendered from inside rather than narrated from outside. The Heroides represent the device’s first sustained literary deployment: not a speaker addressing the absent but the absent themselves speaking, the dead and the abandoned and the betrayed given the language their silence denied them.
It carries forward through the medieval tradition of the dramatic monologue and the Renaissance masque, where inhabiting another voice was both a rhetorical exercise and a theatrical form, and into the Victorian dramatic monologue—Browning’s primary instrument—where the technique became the central method of psychological portraiture. The dramatic monologue extends the device beyond the compression of the lyric: Browning’s speakers reveal themselves over the length of a sustained performance, the self-disclosure gradual, the gap between what the speaker believes about themselves and what the reader hears widening slowly until it becomes the poem’s entire argument. What the lyric form offers prosopopoeia is compression: the persona must reveal itself faster, the self-disclosure concentrated into fewer lines, the mask’s defining crack appearing earlier and more suddenly than the dramatic monologue requires.
CANONICAL EXAMPLE
Sic ubi fata vocant, udis abiectus in herbis ad vada Maeandri concinit albus olor. (So when the fates call, cast down in the wet grass, the white swan sings by the shallows of the Maeander.)
— Ovid, Heroides VII: Dido to Aeneas (c. 10 BCE), trans. Harold Isbell
The full letter runs to one hundred and ninety-six lines, but its governing prosopopoeia is established in the first word: Dido writes. Not Virgil narrating Dido’s grief from outside, not Aeneas remembering her, not the gods arranging her fate—Dido herself, in the first person, at the moment before the pyre. Virgil’s Aeneid had already told this story, had given it its canonical shape—the queen’s passion, Aeneas’s departure, the fire visible from his retreating ships—but Virgil told it as a narrator who knew what the story meant and could position Dido’s grief within the larger argument of Roman destiny. Ovid gives the same story to Dido, and the difference is total.
What Dido knows that Virgil’s narrator does not is the specific interior of the experience: the exact quality of the betrayal, the physical sensation of abandonment, the particular bitterness of a woman who set aside a kingdom’s worth of suitors for a man who is now citing duty as the reason he cannot stay. The Heroides letter is a legal document as much as a love letter—Dido makes her case, marshals her evidence, anticipates and demolishes Aeneas’s counter-arguments with the precision of an advocate who knows she has already lost. What you call destiny, she says, I call cowardice dressed in the language of the gods. The prosopopoeia does not soften her; it gives her the one thing Virgil’s narrative structure denied her, which is the right to name what happened in her own terms.
The swan image in the excerpt is where the device’s formal logic concentrates. The dying swan singing by the Maeander’s shallows is a classical trope for the poet’s death-song, the beautiful final utterance made possible only by the imminence of silence. Ovid places it in Dido’s mouth as her own self-description—she knows she is writing a death-letter, knows the pyre is already built, knows the letter will not arrive in time to change anything—and in placing it there gives her the poet’s authority over her own ending. Virgil’s Dido dies as a consequence of divine machinery and human passion; Ovid’s Dido chooses her last words with the deliberateness of someone who understands that what she writes will outlast what Aeneas does. The prosopopoeia is the mechanism of that outlasting: the voice that Virgil’s narrative silenced, returned to its owner for one hundred and ninety-six lines, the face made from nothing and held in place long enough to say what the original story would not allow.
The Heroides as a collection makes the same argument the individual letter makes: that the figures classical epic moves through without stopping to hear—Ariadne abandoned on Naxos, Medea watching Jason prepare to remarry, Penelope waiting through twenty years of silence—have interiors that the narrative form of epic cannot access because epic is organized around action and consequence rather than around the consciousness that experiences them. Ovid’s solution is the letter, which is by definition a form that exists in the gap between sending and receiving, in the space where the writer cannot know whether what they have written will arrive or matter or change anything. Every letter in the Heroides is written into that gap. Every speaker knows, at some level, that the letter will not be enough—that Aeneas will not turn back, that Jason will not reconsider, that the ships have already sailed. The prosopopoeia does not give these women the power to alter the outcome. It gives them the power to be present in their own stories at the moment the outcome is being determined, which is what the epic tradition, organized around the men who determine outcomes, had declined to do.
MODERN EXAMPLE
"I wept for him as for a wife." —Gilgamesh (Shin-eq-unninni) The sloe sits warm—a brackish purple bruise that will not heal. I taste the cedar still, sap-sweet and bitter; how we split its boughs and made a doorway in the mountain's will. Enkidu laughed, the wind inside his hair was wild as goats along the shale-scarred seam; we wrestled dusk to ground. I felt him there, hard flank to flank—more oath than any dream. We felled Humbaba, yes, his resin breath rose like altar-smoke about our thighs; the axes rang—twin pulses out of death, two shadows locked beneath the gutted skies. Shiduri pours. I drink what cannot stay. His name returns, as salt on lips of clay.
— A Taste of Cedar, Colloquies (Hallucinations)
The prosopopoeia requires the poet to inhabit a grief four thousand years old, conjugal in its intensity, arriving from a culture whose emotional registers do not map cleanly onto contemporary psychological categories. Gilgamesh does not describe what he lost; he reconstructs Enkidu from sense memory, the body’s archive overriding the will before the mind has organized what it carries. The sloe sits warm—a brackish purple bruise / that will not heal: the involuntary return, the wound present in the mouth before the poem has named its subject. The cedar forest was where they went together, where they split the boughs and made a doorway in the mountain’s will—conquest as threshold-making, violence as architecture, two men reordering the landscape through shared force. The wrestling bout that began as combat and became covenant: hard flank to flank—more oath than any dream, the bodies making a promise the dream-world could not ratify because it was sworn in muscle and proximity, in the hard fact of another man’s weight.
The prosopopoeia’s demand is that these details arrive from inside Gilgamesh’s consciousness without importing the poet’s own framework for understanding them. The mask holds because the images are irreplaceable: no other speaker would reach for the shale-scarred seam, the altar-smoke about their thighs, the axes ringing as twin pulses. Two shadows locked beneath the gutted skies is not the poet’s description of the event but Gilgamesh’s—the image of doubleness, one organism with two bodies, a single shadow thrown twice, belonging to a consciousness that experienced the loss as the extinction of half of itself. Shiduri pours. I drink what cannot stay. The tense shift in the couplet is absolute: the cedar-scented past collapses into the present of the tavern, and what Gilgamesh drinks is what the prosopopoeia has been reconstructing across twelve lines. His name returns, as salt on lips of clay—Enkidu’s name in Gilgamesh’s mouth, tasting of the tablets that will preserve it, tasting of the death that made preservation necessary, tasting of the specific grief of a man who held the body until the worms came and could not explain to anyone exactly what had been lost.
The poem’s diptych companion, Shiduri’s By the Sea, inhabits the same event from outside—the tavern keeper’s register dry, proprietorial, recording not the man’s interior but his behavior, the crushed pink umbrella the only evidence of what the interior contains. Together the two masks map what neither alone could reach. The prosopopoeia’s essential work is done in A Taste of Cedar, where the face is made from inside the grief and held in place long enough to say what four thousand years of silence had sealed away.
DIRECT ADDRESS
Direct address is the sustained use of the second person to speak to a specific, identified entity within the poem—a person, a reader, a figure present in the poem’s internal space—as distinct from apostrophe, which turns toward something absent, dead, or incapable of response, and invocation, which calls on a power beyond the speaker. The distinction is one of presence and relationship. In apostrophe, the addressed entity must be summoned into the rhetorical space the address creates, its presence a fiction the device maintains. In direct address, the entity is already present—already inside the poem’s field of relationship—and the second person is not a summons but a confrontation, an inheritance, an implication, a demand. The you does not create the relationship; it activates one that already exists.
The rhetorical force of direct address is a function of implication. When a poem sustains the second person across its length, the reader cannot stand outside the address and evaluate it; they must occupy the position of the one being spoken to, receiving what the poem delivers as though it were directed at them specifically. That implication is not accidental—it is the device’s primary instrument. The you pulls the reader into the poem’s argument regardless of whether the address is literally meant for them, and in doing so makes the argument personal in a way that third-person description or first-person confession cannot achieve. What is said to you arrives differently than what is said about someone else—the grammar of address places the reader inside the poem’s field rather than outside it, and the poem uses that placement as its primary argumentative instrument.
The term has no single classical origin—direct address is a feature of rhetoric, lyric, and dramatic speech so fundamental that it predates formal categorization. It is present in the earliest lyric traditions, in dramatic soliloquy, in the epistolary form, in the sermon and the legal charge. Quintilian treats the direct address of the audience as one of the primary instruments of forensic and deliberative oratory, noting its capacity to make the listener feel personally implicated in the argument being made. In lyric poetry it becomes the defining instrument of the love poem—the beloved addressed directly, the you holding the absent or present object of desire in the poem’s field—and of the elegy, where the dead are addressed as though present, the direct address and the apostrophe converging at the point where the speaker refuses to accept the distance death has imposed.
It carries forward through the English tradition in the sonnet form, where the beloved’s second person is the structural given of the Petrarchan and Shakespearean conventions, and into the Romantic period, where poets begin addressing not only the beloved but the reader directly—breaking the frame between the poem and the world it circulates in, reaching through the text toward whoever holds it. Keats’s late fragment pushes this to its furthest extension: the poem reaching out of its own frame to place the poet’s living hand in the reader’s field of vision, the direct address collapsing the distance between the dying poet and the unknown future reader who will hold the poem after the hand that wrote it is cold. The fragment was found in the manuscript of Lamia and never published in Keats’s lifetime—which means every reader who has ever encountered it has done so after the hand was already cold, the conditional already fulfilled, the haunting already in progress. The direct address does not merely anticipate this condition; it creates it, the poem becoming more itself with every year that passes between its writing and its reading.
The device’s history is also a history of increasing intimacy: from the forensic address of the courtroom to the erotic address of the sonnet to the mortal address of the dying poet reaching toward an unknown future reader. Each extension of the you narrows the distance between speaker and addressee until the frame between them is all that remains—and the frame is what the direct address exists to dissolve.
CANONICAL EXAMPLE
This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy freeing heart That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is— I hold it towards you.
— John Keats, This Living Hand (c. 1819)
The direct address is the poem’s entire argument and its entire mechanism. The thou and thee of the first seven lines hold the reader in the poem’s grip with the formal intimacy of the second person singular, the address building the conditional logic of haunting—if the hand were cold, it would haunt you, it would chill your heart, you would wish your own blood dry so that Keats’s veins might fill again. The conditional is the device’s instrument: the hand is not yet cold, the haunting has not yet begun, and the address holds the reader at the threshold between the poet’s living present and their own future encounter with the poem after the hand that wrote it has gone cold.
The final gesture breaks the conditional entirely. See here it is—I hold it towards you. The poem steps out of its own hypothetical and into the present tense, the dying poet reaching through the frame of the poem toward whoever is reading, the direct address collapsing the distance between Keats’s moment of writing and every future moment of reading. The you shifts from the archaic thou of the conditional to the direct you of the present tense, the formality of the subjunctive replaced by the immediacy of the indicative. The reader cannot receive this as a description of something happening to someone else; the address has placed them inside the poem’s space, the hand extended into their field of vision. What the direct address produces is not sympathy but implication—the reader made present at the moment of the gesture, the position of the one being addressed already occupied before the reader has had the chance to decline it.
MODERN EXAMPLE
Son, we came here to name our ruin, not mend it. Past the tree line's ragged mark, the wounds you carried into me lie strewn in talus. All that's left of men grows stark and simple—ash and weather, breath and dune. Take what remains. The mountain keeps the dark.
— The Missouri Basin, High Ground (Hallucinations)
The direct address arrives in the sestet as the father’s voice in italics, the second person activating a relationship that the octave has been building through landscape rather than speech. The octave is the son’s register—the shale, the cartilage going quiet, the plain scraped bare, the hand raking empty air—and the sestet is the father’s answer to it, the italics marking the shift in speaker and the direct address marking the shift in relationship. Son is the word that does the activating: not you alone but Son, the address naming the relationship before anything else is said, the whole weight of paternal inheritance carried in a single noun of address before the sentence has delivered its content.
What follows is not comfort. We came here to name our ruin, / not mend it is the father’s instruction in the grammar of inheritance—what the landscape is for, what the climb has always been for, what the son has been carrying without knowing how to carry it. The direct address does not soften this; it intensifies it, the second person making the instruction feel like confrontation rather than elegy, the father present in the poem’s internal space and speaking directly to the son rather than being spoken about or mourned. The wounds you carried into me reverses the generational direction of inheritance: not the father’s wounds passed to the son but the son’s wounds absorbed into the father, the address locating the injury in the relationship itself rather than in either party alone.
Take what remains. The mountain keeps the dark. The direct address closes on an imperative—take—the father issuing a final instruction that is also a release, the second person delivering the inheritance and surrendering it in the same gesture. The mountain keeping the dark is not consolation but fact, the landscape indifferent to the transaction it has witnessed, and the direct address that has held the son in the poem’s field of relationship throughout the sestet closes without resolution, the you implicit in take receiving what the mountain cannot keep and the father can no longer hold.
ENCOMIUM
Encomium is the rhetoric of formal praise—the address of a person, achievement, or quality in language calibrated to the scale of what is being honored, the speaker’s task not to describe but to make permanent. Where apostrophe turns toward the absent and generates the fiction of presence, and complaint addresses the unresponsive to articulate a wound, encomium turns toward its subject with the specific purpose of establishing their worth against the erosion of time. The praise is not decoration but argument: the encomium claims that the person or achievement being honored deserves to outlast the moment of their occurrence, that the poem’s act of naming is itself a form of preservation, that what is said here will remain when the occasion that prompted it has passed.
The device’s primary rhetorical demand is specificity. Generic praise—the subject was noble, courageous, gifted, beloved—produces nothing the reader cannot supply from any available template of virtue, and a praise that could describe anyone describes no one. The encomium earns its verdict through the irreplaceable particular: the detail that belongs only to this person, the observation that could not have been made about anyone else, the image that captures not virtue in general but this specific way of being virtuous, this specific weight the subject carried in the world. The summative judgment the encomium builds toward must feel discovered rather than imposed, earned by everything that preceded it rather than declared in advance of the evidence.
The term derives from the Greek ἐγκώμιον (enkōmion), meaning the song sung at the kōmos—the celebratory procession that followed athletic victory in the ancient Greek games. It enters formal rhetorical theory through the tradition of epideictic rhetoric, the rhetoric of display and celebration, catalogued by Aristotle alongside deliberative and forensic rhetoric as one of the three primary modes of public speech. Epideictic rhetoric operates in the present tense of values rather than the future tense of policy or the past tense of legal judgment: it does not argue for a course of action or establish guilt or innocence but rather holds up for collective recognition what the community already values, the encomium naming excellence so that excellence can be seen, celebrated, and remembered.
It enters the literary tradition through Pindar, whose epinician odes—victory odes composed for winners at the Panhellenic games—are the formal encomium’s defining achievement. Pindar’s odes do not simply record athletic victory; they situate the victor within the mythological and genealogical fabric of Greek culture, the praise expanding outward from the specific win to the family line, the city-state, the divine ancestry, the pattern of excellence the victory instantiates. The encomium carries forward through the Latin tradition of the panegyric, the Renaissance culture of literary patronage where poets were expected to celebrate their dedicatees in forms equal to the occasion, and into the English elegy of praise—Ben Jonson’s epitaphs, Milton’s Lycidas—where the encomium and the elegy converge at the point where loss makes the praise urgent.
What the encomium loses as it moves through this history is its public occasion. Pindar’s odes were performed—sung at the victor’s homecoming, the praise delivered into a communal space where the achievement being celebrated was already known and the poem’s task was to fix it permanently in the culture’s memory. The Renaissance panegyric still operated within a patronage system that was essentially public: the dedicatee read the praise knowing others would read it too, the poem circulating as a form of social currency. By the time the mode reaches the English elegy of praise—Jonson’s epitaphs, Milton’s Lycidas—the occasion has become private grief made public, the praise urgent because the subject can no longer receive it. And by the time it reaches the dedicated poem of the modern period, the occasion has contracted further still: a specific person, a specific quality, an address that may never reach the one it names. The encomium survives this contraction not by abandoning its ambition but by concentrating it—the praise that once required a stadium now requires only the precision of a single irreplaceable detail.
CANONICAL EXAMPLE
Water is best, and gold, like a blazing fire in the night, outshines all pride of wealth beside. But if of games thou art fain, O my heart, to tell—look not in the barren sky for any star more warming than the sun, nor any contest greater than Olympia.
— Pindar, Olympian Ode I (476 BCE), trans. Richmond Lattimore
The ode was composed for Hieron of Syracuse, tyrant of the most powerful Greek city in the western Mediterranean, victor in the single horse race at Olympia in 476 BCE. Pindar opens not with Hieron but with water, gold, and the sun—the three superlatives of the natural world arranged in ascending order of brightness—before arriving at the human occasion that prompted them: no contest greater than Olympia, no victor more worth celebrating than the man this poem is for. The encomium’s argument is made before Hieron is named, which is the device’s most audacious formal move. By the time the victor appears, the poem has already established the scale at which his achievement must be measured: not against other men but against gold, against fire, against the sun itself.
What Pindar’s encomium demonstrates is that praise operates through context rather than assertion. To say that Hieron is excellent is to say nothing; to position his victory within the hierarchy of water, gold, sun, and Olympia is to make excellence felt at the scale it requires. The ode does not describe Hieron’s horsemanship or his political authority or his personal virtues in any detail that would individuate him; what it describes is the occasion, the games, the tradition of excellence the games embody, and Hieron’s participation in that tradition. The praise is structural rather than personal—the victor made permanent not by being described but by being placed within a frame whose permanence precedes and will outlast him.
The mythological digression that follows in the full ode—the story of Pelops, whose divine favor at the games established the pattern Hieron now instantiates—is the encomium’s epistemological claim: excellence at Olympia is not a single event but a recurring form, and the victor is not merely a man who won a race but a figure who has taken his place in a sequence that began with the gods and will continue past any individual occasion. Pindar’s encomium preserves Hieron not by describing him but by installing him in a structure that was already permanent, the praise completed not through description but through placement. The Pelops myth is not decoration; it is the load-bearing argument, the proof that the games have always been the site where divine favor and human excellence meet, that Hieron’s victory is the latest instantiation of a pattern the gods themselves established. What Pindar offers the victor is not a portrait but a genealogy—not this is who you are but this is the sequence you have entered, and the sequence precedes you and will outlast you, which is precisely what makes the praise permanent rather than occasional. The encomium works because it subordinates the individual to the form, the man to the pattern, the specific afternoon in 476 BCE to the structure of excellence that was already old when Pelops first drove his chariot across the finish line.
MODERN EXAMPLE
The Last Picture Show For Jim Johnson A cross-dissolve might be construed as too sentimental for a seasoned eye in a non-antiquarian such as you. Which is to say, you would decide to show the portrait of the young aesthete enjambed against an ailing patriarch, like Kubrick's up-cranked primate hurling his bone in a heavenly arc cutting to an indolent craft in focus, marking epochs in between the static grace of Discobolus anticipating still this box of dreams and a thousand statues flickering in the dark. That would be you. You'd drive the reel ahead past creaking scenes, past dialogue and arc, past diegesis heavy with the dead, past hemlock, ailing masters, acolytes conjoined, and say: Just cut to the fucking point.
— The Last Picture Show, Diversions (Hallucinations)
The encomium announces itself in the third line and nowhere else: a non-antiquarian such as you. That is the poem’s only direct characterization of Jim Johnson, and it arrives as a negation—what he is not—before the poem has shown a single thing he is. Everything that follows is demonstration rather than declaration, the praise built entirely from the specificity of what Johnson would do with the material and how he would do it. The cross-dissolve he would reject, the Kubrick cut he would recognize as the right model, the inventory of everything he would drive the reel past—these are not generic virtues. They are the portrait of a particular editorial philosophy, a specific way of seeing that could not be mistaken for anyone else’s.
The encomium’s formal strategy is the conditional: you would decide, that would be you, you’d drive the reel ahead. The praise operates in the subjunctive, the poem constructing what Johnson would do rather than describing what he has done, and in that construction the portrait becomes more precise than any record of actual achievement could be. The conditional is not uncertainty—it is the encomium’s deepest form of knowing, the claim that the subject has been understood well enough that their response to any situation can be predicted with confidence. That would be you is the pivot, the moment the poem steps back from its conditional construction and asserts the identification: yes, this is the person. The inventory that follows—past creaking scenes, past dialogue and arc, / past diegesis heavy with the dead, / past hemlock, ailing masters, acolytes conjoined—is the past anaphora doing the encomium’s accumulative work, each discarded element defining Johnson’s editorial philosophy by what it refuses rather than what it keeps.
And say: Just cut to the fucking point. The encomium closes by handing Johnson his own verdict, the poem ending in his voice rather than the speaker’s. Pindar installs his victor in a structure already permanent; this encomium installs its subject in the final line by giving him the last word, the praise completed in the voice of the person being praised. The profanity is the mark of seriousness—the word that cuts through every reverential register the poem has been constructing, arriving not as vulgarity but as the editorial judgment the entire poem has been building toward. The encomium earns its verdict not by declaring Johnson’s excellence but by demonstrating it: seventeen lines of classical and cinematic intelligence in the service of a final line that enacts precisely the quality being honored.
COMPLAINT
Complaint is the formal rhetorical lament addressed to an absent, unavailable, or unresponsive entity—a beloved, a god, time, fate, an institution—in which the speaker articulates a grievance or grief that cannot be resolved. The address is the defining feature: the complaint is not self-directed confession but outward speech, the speaker positioning themselves in relation to a power or presence that has caused, or failed to prevent, the loss being named. The wound is the governing condition rather than the argument—the complaint does not seek to persuade so much as to hold the naming open, to keep the address alive in the face of a silence that will not break, and resolution, where it arrives at all, comes as recognition or endurance rather than remedy.
The distinction from adjacent devices is one of direction and expectation. Elegy mourns but performs its grief in the hope that the performance will discharge the debt, restore some equilibrium between the living and the lost. Apostrophe turns toward the absent and generates the fiction of presence, the address itself a form of summoning. The complaint refuses both economies: it does not expect the performance to heal, and it does not pretend that the address will be received. The speaker inhabits the knowledge that the line is dead and maintains the address anyway, and that persistence in the face of guaranteed non-response is what separates the complaint from every adjacent form of grief. The obligation to speak does not depend on the possibility of being heard.
The term descends from the Latin planctus, the formal lament, and the Old French complainte, the grievance poem addressed to an unresponsive beloved or an indifferent fate. It enters literary theory through the medieval lyric tradition, where the complaint is one of the primary forms of courtly love poetry—the speaker addressing an absent or disdainful beloved, the grievance sustained without hope of resolution, the form itself a demonstration of fidelity to the wound. Chaucer deploys it in The Complaint to His Lady and Anelida and Arcite; the mode runs through Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella as a governing condition beneath the sonnet sequence’s surface argument. What the complaint’s history demonstrates is that the device is older than its formal codification, older than the medieval lyric that gave it its name: wherever a human speaker addresses a power that will not answer and keeps speaking anyway, the complaint is operating, and its oldest instance in the Western tradition is not a love poem but a city’s address to God in the aftermath of total destruction.
Lamentations—five poems appended to the Hebrew prophetic tradition, attributed in the Christian canon to Jeremiah, composed in the immediate aftermath of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE—is the complaint at its most cosmological. The city speaks, personified as a woman sitting in the ruins of what she was, addressing a God whose absence is the catastrophe being named. The formal constraint is the acrostic: each verse of the first four chapters begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the entire alphabet deployed as a container for grief, as though the complaint must be as complete as language itself before it can be adequate to what happened. The form does not resolve the grief; it holds it.
CANONICAL EXAMPLE
How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary! She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her: all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies. Judah is gone into captivity because of affliction, and because of great servitude: she dwelleth among the heathen, she findeth no rest: all her persecutors overtook her between the straits.
— Lamentations 1:1–3, King James Bible (1611)
The complaint opens on a single word that contains its entire argument: How. Not why, which would be a demand for explanation, and not O, which would be apostrophe’s direct address. How is the complaint’s characteristic opening gesture—the speaker confronting the fact of what has happened and finding that the only honest response is to name its quality rather than its cause. How doth the city sit solitary. The city is not being explained or argued about or mourned in the elegiac mode; it is being addressed, its condition named in the second person of the personified widow, the speaker turning toward Jerusalem as toward a woman sitting alone in the ruins of what she was.
The three verses establish the complaint’s governing structure through accumulation and negation. The city was full of people, was great among the nations, was princess among the provinces—the past tense doing the work of loss without ever stating the loss directly, the gap between what the city was and what it now is the space the complaint inhabits. She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: the grief is physical, somatic, located in the body of the personified city before it is located in any theological or political argument. Among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her—the complaint’s defining condition stated in its starkest form: the address has no recipient willing or able to respond, the speaker naming the absence of comfort as the wound’s essential quality rather than its cause.
The acrostic constraint—each verse beginning with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet—is the complaint’s formal argument made visible. The grief must be as complete as language itself before it can be adequate to what happened. The alphabetic sequence does not resolve the lament; it contains it, the formal completeness of the constraint performing the only completeness available when the thing being mourned cannot be restored. All her persecutors overtook her between the straits: the city caught between its enemies, between the walls of the pass, between the life it had and the captivity it is entering. The complaint’s characteristic space is exactly this—the strait, the narrow place, the gap between what was and what is—and Lamentations names it as both historical fact and rhetorical condition. The speaker addresses a city that cannot respond, on behalf of a God whose absence is the catastrophe, with a formal constraint that enforces completeness without promising resolution. When the alphabet ends, the lament has not closed—it has simply run out of letters.
The acrostic is also a wager against forgetting. In a tradition where scripture is copied by hand, where the transmission of text across centuries depends on the fidelity of scribes working in conditions of dispersal and loss, a poem organized by the alphabet is a poem that can be reconstructed from its own ruins—if you have the first letter of each verse, you have the skeleton of the whole. Lamentations encodes its own recovery into its formal structure, the alphabetic sequence a mnemonic device as well as a rhetorical one, the grief made memorizable precisely because it has been made complete. The constraint does not merely contain the lament; it ensures that the lament can be carried, passed on, reassembled even when the community that produced it has been scattered across the territories of its conquerors. The form is the survival strategy.
MODERN EXAMPLE
The Wind Phone "The phone doesn't connect to the dead. It connects to the wind." — Itaru Sasaki The river bears its witness under stone. What gathers there refuses any face. No psalm will lift it. Weather claims its own, a pressure time can neither spend nor place. In Iwate Prefecture, the phone weighs down the air. You lift it. Something tightens in the wire. No god steps in. No answer meets you there. The mouth goes on, exacting its desire. I call. I do not beg for my release. I hold the strain where breath and metal bind— the living hitched to what will never cease, lover and poet breaking in the mind. I speak into the form. It does not take. No voice accepts the offering I make.
— The Wind Phone, Oracles (Hallucinations)
The complaint’s governing condition is established before the speaker appears, before the phone, before Otsuchi, before any address is attempted. The river bears its witness under stone—witness stripped of every comfort the word usually carries, testimony without a court, record without a reader. What gathers there refuses any face: the accumulated grief actively resisting the human need to make it legible, to give it the shape of a person or a narrative or a cause. No psalm will lift it—the complaint dismissing in four words the entire apparatus of ritual consolation, the technologies the species has developed for metabolizing the unbearable. The forces that remain when psalm fails are geological and climatological, operating on timescales that make individual grief a rounding error. Weather claims its own.
Itaru Sasaki built the wind phone in his garden in Otsuchi after his cousin died, before the 2011 tsunami killed fifteen thousand people in Iwate Prefecture and sent them, over the years following, to speak into a disconnected telephone on a hillside above the Pacific. What the complaint inhabits is precisely this structure: the address maintained in the total absence of the possibility of response, the speaker lifting the receiver knowing it is dead, the gesture made anyway because the obligation to speak does not depend on the possibility of being heard. You lift it. Something tightens in the wire. No god steps in. No answer meets you there. The double negation is not despair; it is procedural clarity. The poem has already ruled out psalm; now it rules out divine mediation. What remains is the mouth.
The shift from third person to first at line nine is the complaint’s defining movement. The poem has been establishing conditions—the stone, the weather, the phone, the absence of god—and now the speaker steps into them: I call. I do not beg for my release. The line that separates the complaint from elegy is precisely here. Elegy performs grief in the hope that the performance will discharge the debt. The complaint refuses that economy. The speaker does not ask to be released from the obligation of address; they hold the strain where breath and metal bind, the living hitched to what will never cease, the wire taut between a biological system and a dead line. Lover and poet breaking in the mind: two modes of maintaining connection across absence, both under a strain the mind registers as fracture.
I speak into the form. It does not take. The form is the aggregate ritual apparatus of everything that preceded it—river, stone, weather, phone, wire, god-shaped absence, mouth, breath, metal—and it does not take in the way a graft does not take, the offering made and refused not in judgment but in the physics of the situation. No voice accepts the offering I make. The complaint closes on the word that has been withheld through the entire poem, the thing the mouth has been going on in the absence of. The offering is not wrong. The poem does not say the offering was wrong. It says the offering was not received, which is a different statement and a more precise one, because it leaves the obligation intact. When the alphabet ends in Lamentations, the lament has not closed—it has simply run out of letters. When the line goes dead in The Wind Phone, the mouth does not stop. Neither closure is resolution. Both are the complaint’s only available form of honesty—the address maintained to the last syllable, the silence on the other end unchanged.
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