"The river – with the sunlight flashing from its dancing wavelets, gilding gold the grey-green beech-trunks, glinting through the dark, cool wood paths, chasing shadows o'er the shallows, flinging diamonds from the mill-wheels, throwing kisses to the lilies, wantoning with the weir's white waters, silvering moss-grown walls and bridges, brightening every tiny townlet, making sweet each lane and meadow, lying tangled in the rushes, peeping, laughing, from each inlet, gleaming gay on many a far sail, making soft the air with glory – is a golden fairy stream.
But the river – chill and weary, with the ceaseless rain drops falling on its brown and sluggish waters, with the sound as of a woman, weeping low in some dark chamber, while the woods all dark and silent, shrouded in their mists of vapour, stand like ghosts upon the margin, silent ghosts with eyes reproachful like the ghosts of evil actions, like the ghosts of friends neglected – is a spirit-haunted water through the land of vain regrets." (Jerome K. Jerome)
The two paragraphs are made into one long span of thought by the signal But and the repetition of the word river after which in both cases a pause is indicated by a dash which suggests a different intonation pattern of the word river. The opposing members of the contrast are the 'sunlight flashing' – 'ceaseless rain drops falling'; 'gilding gold the grey-green beech-trunks, glinting through the dark, cool wood paths' – 'the woods, all dark and silent, shrouded in their mists of vapour, stand like ghosts...'; 'golden fairy stream' – 'spirit-haunted water'.
Still there are several things lacking to show a clear case of a stylistic device, viz. the words involved in the opposition do not display any additional nuance of meaning caused by being opposed one to another; there are no true parallel constructions except, perhaps, the general pattern of the two paragraphs, with all the descriptive parts placed between the grammatical subject and predicate, the two predicates serving as a kind of summing up, thus completing the contrast.
'The river... is a golden fairy stream.' – 'But the river... is a spirit-haunted water through the land of vain regrets.' The contrast embodied in these two paragraphs is, however, akin to the stylistic device of antithesis.
Antithesis has the following basic functions: rhythm-forming (because of the parallel arrangement on which it is founded); copulative; dissevering; comparative. These functions often go together and intermingle in their own peculiar manner. But as a rule antithesis displays one of the functions more clearly than the others. This particular function will then be the leading one in the given utterance. An interesting example of antithesis where the comparative function is predominant is the madrigal ascribed to Shakespeare:
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