Neutral Diction in Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

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The Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock, what a time of night! "The houses are haunted by white night-gowns." Everything is the same from one house to the next. Not only does Wallace Stevens hint at the Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock, he also brings forth feelings of loneliness and despair through his select use of neutral diction. Stevens emphasizes neutral diction using parallelism and repetition, the sameness of the syntax, and an ironic change in wording. Nevertheless, the emotion of the poem is only brought about by Stevens' specific use of neutral diction.

"None are green, or purple with green rings, or green with yellow rings, or yellow with blue rings." A common theme runs throughout this poem, which is linked together through the author's use of parallelism and repetition. Stevens chose to provide the poem with a structure that was consistent throughout. In each line quoted above, he repeated colors and used the same phrases over and over again. By doing this, the author was able to drive home his point. He made it clear to the reader that there wasn't anything exciting happ...

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