Weeping Willow illustrates________

Analyze the question: "Weeping Willow" is the name of a tree whose long branches droop downward like falling tears. The question asks which literary device this name illustrates.

Explain the concepts:

• Dramatic monologue: a poem or speech in which one character speaks to a silent listener and reveals their own personality, as in Browning's "My Last Duchess".
• Pathetic fallacy: giving human emotions to nature or inanimate things, so that nature seems to share human feelings. An example is "the sky wept" or "the angry sea".
• Transferred epithet: an adjective that describes a person's feeling but is attached to a noun it does not literally describe. An example is "a sleepless night", where it is the person who cannot sleep, not the night.
• Dramatic irony: the audience knows something that a character does not.

Solution:

1. The phrase "Weeping Willow" gives a human action, weeping, to a tree.
2. Weeping is an emotion-driven human behavior, so the tree is made to seem sorrowful.
3. It is not a monologue, because nobody is speaking.
4. It is not dramatic irony, because there is no gap in knowledge between the audience and a character.
5. A transferred epithet would need the "weeping" to belong to a person's emotion and be moved onto the willow. Here the willow is simply described as grieving, which is attributing human feeling to nature. That is pathetic fallacy.

Answer: B. Pathetic Fallacy

Exam tip: For "pathetic fallacy", think "nature feels human emotions", such as weeping skies, angry storms and smiling meadows. For "transferred epithet", think "a describing word moved from the person to an object", such as "a restless night". If nature is acting like it has feelings, choose pathetic fallacy.