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Are there any examples of synecdoche, metonymy or apostrophe in Emily Dickinson's "'Why Do I Love' You, Sir?"?

One can find apostrophe, metonymy, and possibly synecdoche in this poem by Emily Dickinson. Apostrophe is a dramatic or formal address, often to an inanimate object, such as , "O Life!" However, it can be a kind of exclamatory address to someone absent. So the "Sir" in line one is an apostrophe, as is "Sire" in the first line of the last stanza.


Metonymy names a thing by using something associated with it. In this poem, in the last stanza, the speaker is referring to the sun, but she names it "Sunrise." The idea is that a person is able to see simply because the sun produces light. In the same way, the speaker loves her lover simply because he produces those spontaneous feelings in her.


Synecdoche is harder to get from this poem. With synecdoche, a thing is named for one of its parts. One might think about the "Eye" being a synecdoche for the whole person, but that doesn't seem to be what Dickinson wants to say here. She seems to want to personify the Eye as its own separate entity. It's possible that "Wisdom" could be a synecdoche. One would expect the word used here to be "knowledge," and since "wisdom" is a subset of "knowledge," it might work as a synecdoche. I don't see how "Daintier Folk" can be a synecdoche. I would call that an epithet. 

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