Rhetorical address

Rhetorical address is a stylistic figure consisting in an emphatic appeal to an absent person, an inanimate object, an abstract concept or a natural phenomenon, as if they were able to hear and respond: "O native land!", "Wild wind, little wind!". The aim of such an address is not communication but the expression of the author's strong feeling, the lending of an elevated, solemn or lyrical intonation to speech. Rhetorical address often combines with personification, animating the addressee, and with the rhetorical exclamation. This figure is characteristic of the ode, hymn, elegy, civic and intimate lyric. In world poetics it is traditionally designated by the term "apostrophe." Rhetorical address is an important means of the emotional-expressive organisation of a poetic utterance.