What "apostrophe" means in literature

A term you'll meet in rhetoric & poetry.

Apostrophe as a literary device has nothing to do with the punctuation mark. (Both come from the same Greek root — apostrophē, "turning away" — but they took different paths.) The rhetorical apostrophe is the moment when a speaker turns aside from the audience and addresses someone, or something, who is not there.

What gets addressed

Apostrophe can address:

An absent person. "O Caesar, thou art mighty yet…" (Brutus speaking to the dead Caesar in Julius Caesar).
A dead person. Most elegies are sustained apostrophes — the poet speaking directly to the dead.
An abstract idea. "Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!" (Shelley addressing the abstract idea of poetic inspiration in "To a Skylark.")
An inanimate object. "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean, roll!" (Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage).
A divinity. Prayer in poetry is often a formal apostrophe.

The signal word: "O"

Classical and Romantic apostrophes are often marked by the vocative "O" — "O wild West Wind…" (Shelley), "O Captain! my Captain!" (Whitman). The "O" tells you the speaker has stopped addressing the audience and pivoted to the absent addressee. Modern poets generally drop the "O" but the gesture remains.

Why poets use it

Apostrophe lets a poem do three things at once: dramatize the speaker's relationship with the absent thing, make the abstract feel present, and produce a strange double-channel — the words technically addressed to (say) the wind, but actually overheard by you. John Stuart Mill defined lyric poetry as "feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude" — apostrophe is the formal mechanism that lets that happen.

How to read it in context

When a poem suddenly addresses a person, idea, or object by name — "O Death," "O Memory," "Sister, my sister, O fleet sweet swallow" — ask why the speaker needs that gesture. Apostrophe is rarely casual. It marks a turn in the poem's emotional centre of gravity, often the moment of greatest intensity.

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