"""She is the hopeful lady of my earth ..." What language technique does Shakespeare use here?""

In act 1, scene 2 of ,
Capulet andare discussing how soon Paris might be able to marry . Capulet stresses how much his
daughter means to him by emphasizing that she is his only surviving child. He says,

The earth hath swallow'd all my hopes but she,
She is the
hopeful lady of my earth ...

There are a number of
literary techniques on display here. One is chiasmus, which means "crossing." The
earth and Juliet appear in the first line in that order, then the order is reversed in the
second line, creating the pattern of a cross. This is emphasized by the specific arrangement of
the words and phrases "The earth ... she / She ... my earth." The pattern is a
combination of epizeuxis in the immediate repetition of "she" and epanalepsis in the
repetition of "earth" at the beginning and end.

Shakespeare also
personifies "earth" in the first line, then uses it as a symbol (for death) in the
second. Death and earth (used in this sense) are perhaps slightly too close for this symbolic
usage to be regarded as a , but if we regard earth, or being laid in earth, as a part of death,
then we might regard this as a form of synecdoche. The"hopeful" is employed in the
sense of creating or causing, rather than experiencing, hope. If it were used in the modern
sense, it would properly attach to Capulet rather than Juliet, and the device would be that of
hypallage (transferred epithet).