General Douglas Macarthur has been known and is a profound personality, not only in the history of our country but in the history of the world. This speech was made when he was going to receive an award from his alma mater after his retirement from the army.
The speech describes the duties, responsibilities and honor of being a cadet or military that is already established even from his title. In three words, the vocation of a military man is already described: Duty, Honor, Homeland.
By the frequency of the rhetorical devices used, we can say that Macarthur has the gift of rhetorical dexterity since each paragraph has devices injected into each one. And these rhetorical devices that are listed in the table above, help to give a more solid and vivid explanation of the meaning you want to convey. The gift of imagination and its poetic side made its way into a literal text and has really served its purpose.
First, let’s look at all the examples of anaphora. In the following sentences, we can see the first words and / or repeated sentences in a consecutive sentence or sentences.
They are their meeting points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; regain faith when there seems to be little reason for faith; to create hope when hope is lost. In these sentences of paragraph 4, the preposition ‘a’ is repeated that introduces other sentences in the sentence.
The same concept applies in paragraph 5, where “that” is repeated. Unfortunately, I have neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you everything they mean.
Other inflections stand out here:
Unbelievers will say that they are just words, but a catchphrase, but an outrageous phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and I am sorry to say, some others of a completely different character, will try to demean you even to the point of ridicule and ridicule.
But these are some of the things they do: They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as custodians of the nation’s defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid. They teach you to be proud and inflexible in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; do not substitute actions for words, do not seek the path of comfort, but face stress and the spur of difficulty and challenge; learn to stand in the storm but have compassion on those who fall; mastering oneself before seeking to dominate others; have a clean heart, a high goal; learn to laugh, but never forget how to cry; reach the future without ever neglecting the past; be serious but never take yourself too seriously; Be modest to remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.
They give you a temperament of will, a quality of imagination, a vigor of emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over shyness, of the appetite for adventure over the love of comfort. Create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what will come next, and the joy and inspiration of life. Thus they teach you to be an officer and a gentleman.
And what kind of soldiers are you going to lead? Are they reliable? They are brave? Are they capable of victory?
In the second sentence of the fourth paragraph, Diacope is applied, the repetition of one or more words after the interval of one or more words in a sentence. They are their meeting points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; regain faith when there seems to be little reason for faith; to create hope when hope is lost.
And finally, the first sentence of the same paragraph is an example of Symploce, which is the combination of Anaphora and Epistrophe, the repetition of the first and last word. Duty, honor, country: Those three sacred words reverently dictate what you should be, what you can be, what you will be.
