Apostrophe is also a LITERARY DEVICE used in poetry and drama. It describes a particular type of dramatic speech made to an to inanimate objects or abstraction. The plays of Shakespeare are full of apostrophes. For instance, in Julius Caesar, after Caesar is assassinated, Antony addresses his corpse thus:
"O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth..."
In Romeo and Juliet, the distraught young woman speaks to fate: "Oh Fortune, Fortune, all men call thee fickle," and later in the play, Romeo rails against destiny in a similar vein, "Then I defy you, stars!"
The famous lines of the British Romantic poet George Gordon Lord Byron provide another kind of example, with the poet addressing some aspect of nature, in this case the ocean:
"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll
Then thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain..."
from Childe Harold
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