Discussion
Identify the figure of speech in the following lines :
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each Breast :
But thirty thousand for the rest.
Answer: C
The figure of speech is hyperbole.
The lines are from Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress. The speaker says that, if they had time enough, he would spend a hundred years praising the lady's eyes, two hundred on each breast and thirty thousand on the rest. These absurd spans of time are deliberate exaggeration, used to flatter and to set up the poem's turn to 'Time's winged chariot hurrying near'.
Irony says the opposite of what is meant, metonymy names a thing by something associated with it, and an oxymoron joins contradictory terms. The lines rely on none of these; their force is the overstatement.
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