FAMOUS HYPERBOLES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

FAMOUS HYPERBOLES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

To His Coy Mistress

Andrew Marvell

A hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast;

But thirty thousand to the rest.

A Red, Red, Rose" by Robert Burns

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,

And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;

I will love thee still, my dear,

While the sands o’ life shall run

As I Walked Out One Evening

W.H. Auden

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you

Till China and Africa meet,

And the river jumps over the mountain

And the salmon sing in the street."

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

William Wordsworth

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in a never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand I saw at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

LoveToKnow's Kelly Roper

One thousand stampeding bison thundering across the plains

Couldn't drown out the sound of my heart beating for you.

Its rhythm feeds the greatest symphony ever known to man,

Yet such life-transforming love is experienced by so few.

Parker's Back by Flannery O'Connor 

"The skin on her face was as thin and drawn as tight as the skin of onion and her eyes were gray and sharp like the points of two picks."

Babe the Blue Ox Retold by S.E. Schlosser

A great example of hyperbole in literature comes from the narrator's opening remarks in the American folktale Babe the Blue Ox. It comically gets across just how cold it was.

"Well now, one winter it was so cold that all the geese flew backward and all the fish moved south and even the snow turned blue. Late at night, it got so frigid that all spoken words froze solid afore they could be heard. People had to wait until sunup to find out what folks were talking about the night before."

The People, Yes by Carl Sandburg

"The People, Yes" is a poem by Carl Sandburg, whose funny quips are often called Sandburgers. As in To Kill a Mockingbird, Sandburg uses a hyperbolic line to emphasize a slow pace of life

It's a slow burg-I spent a couple of weeks there one day