The Oval Portrait

Syntax refers to the rules for arranging words into sentences. Poe’s sentences are carefully structured to produce specific effects. For example, in the following sentence, he repeatedly uses the em dash to embed ideas and create a sentence as elaborate and suspenseful as the chateau it describes:

In these paintings, which depended from the walls not only in their main surfaces, but in very many nooks which the bizarre architecture of the chateau rendered necessary—in these paintings my incipient delirium, perhaps, had caused me to take deep interest; so that I bade Pedro to close the heavy shutters of the room—since it was already night—to light the tongues of a tall candelabrum which stood by the head of my bed—and to throw open far and wide the fringed curtains of black velvet which enveloped the bed itself (481).

Another syntax technique Poe is known for is anastrophe, in which words are moved out of their usual grammatical order. In the sentence “[r]apidly and gloriously the hours flew by, and the deep midnight came,” Poe moves the adverbs from their usual position after the verb into the high-visibility position at the sentence’s beginning in order to create a parallel

Don't Miss Out!

Access Study Guide Now