Figurative Launguage ~ Once More to the Lake

     There are many examples of E.B. White's use of figurative language giving life to inanimate objects in his essay Once More to the Lake. This technique is called personification, and White employs it throughout his description of the lake he visits and the wilderness around it. Personification improves his descriptions of settings and makes his writing more emotionally charged by building a connection between the author, the story, and the reader.

     Some examples of this literary life-giving include motors and their sound,

"The only thing that was wrong now, really, was the sound of the place, an unfamiliar nervous sound of outboard motors."
"In the daytime, in the hot mornings, these motors made a petulant, irritable sound; at night, in the still evening when the afterglow lit the water, they whined about one's ears like mosquitoes."

     A tennis court that lays in the sun,

"But the way led past the tennis court, and something about the way it lay there in the sun reassured me;the tape had loosened along the backline, the alleys were green with plantains and other weeds, and the net (installed in June and removed in September) sagged in the dry noon, and the whole place steamed with midday heat and hunger and emptiness."

     The rain that rustles the calm lake,

"Afterwards the calm, the rain steadily rustling in the calm lake, the return of light and hope and spirits, and the campers running out in joy and relief to go swimming in the rain, their bright cries perpetuating the deathless joke about how they were getting simply drenched, and the children screaming with delight at the new sensation of bathing in the rain, and the joke about getting drenched linking the generations in a strong indestructible chain."

     And, of course, the trustworthy lake itself.

"This seemed an utterly enchanted sea, this lake you could leave to its own devices for a few hours and come back to, and find that it had not stirred, this constant and trustworthy body of water."

     In the previous quote, for example, he gives a subjective description of the lake by describing not only how it physically is (unchanging and constant), but the feelings the narrator has towards it as well, deeming it trustworthy. An objective description of this same scene would lack the authors perspective and personal relationship to the lake. Therefore, the author uses personification to make his work more emotional and relatable. Describing these nonliving otherwise plain objects and places as lifelike beings allows the reader to connect with them on a new level and provides a more detailed setting or describes an object more clearly and simply than indicating its actual characteristic would.

     Personification does more than just connect the reader to the author's state of mind; it also enhances the creativity of the writing and makes reading it a more enjoyable activity. A novel written in straightforward English would fail to captivate its readers, which is why figurative language is such a powerful tool in all forms of writing. A "nervous" motor is more intriguing than one that sounds broken, and a tennis court "laying in the sun" has more attitude than a setting usually possesses. Colorful, creative writing makes White's story more interesting and thus more appealing to readers.

     Figurative language comes in many forms. In Once More to the Lake, personification is a powerful example of how figurative language makes literary works more interesting, relatable, and revealing about the attitude of the author.