The author’s purpose in comparing each "mast and spar" to a "prison-bar" is to evoke a sense of confinement and danger. This imagery creates a foreboding atmosphere, suggesting that the British warship, the Somerset, symbolizes oppression and the looming threat of British control over the colonies. By using this metaphor, Longfellow highlights the tension and anxiety of the times, emphasizing the urgency of Paul Revere’s mission to warn the colonists about the impending British advance.
Paul Revere’s Ride
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal-light,
One, if by land, and two, if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.”
Then he said, Good-night! and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison-bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.
Use the first three stanzas of the poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to answer the question.
The author’s purpose in comparing each “mast and spar” to a what , is to what
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