When we look at poetic devices in the narrative of the story
Her First Ball the most salient one is definitely imagery. Imagery is the
license used by writers to appeal to all the five senses so that the reader can become immersed
in the work.
In this story, the main character is experiencing a
first major event Her first ball. It is necessary that Mansfield describes all her emotions by
summoning every sight and sound that helps the main character connect to her environment and
completely convey her atmosphere onto the reader's own:
Darling little pink-and-silver programmes, with pink
pencils and fluffy tassels
The use of
similes helps to also establish comparisons between the main character's feelings versus what is
really going on:
the bolster on which her hand rested felt
like the sleeve of an unknown young man's dress suit; and away they bowled, past waltzing
lamp-posts and houses and fences and trees.
Even the things
she remembers from before her first ball (which is used to establish a dramatic contrast between
the past and the present) pay tribute to all the
senses:
that dusty-smelling hall–with calico texts on the
walls, the poor, terrified little woman in a brown velvet toque with rabbit's ears thumping the
cold piano.
We can also find onomatopoeia and
personification when Leila remembers the sounds of her country
home
she had had to be
sitting on the veranda of their forsaken up-country home, listening to the baby owls crying "More
pork" in the moonlight
You can find a
myriad of poetic devices used in Her First Ball. Mansfield treated with
great care and detail the themes of innocence, naivete, and the old versus the new. Almost the
entire story is literally soaking with detail and depictions, emotions, and observations.
Conclusively, the use of imagery is the strongest stylistic device and certainly the one which
conveys the strongest sense of poetry within this prose work.
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