General Douglas Macarthur has been known and is a deep personality, not only in the history of our country but in the history of the world. This speech was made when he was to receive an award from his alma mater for his retirement from the military.
The speech outlines the duties, responsibilities, and honor of being a cadet or a military man that is already established even from his title. The vocation of a military man is already described in three words: Duty, Honor, Country.
From the frequency of the rhetorical devices used, we can say that Macarthur has the gift of rhetorical skill, since each paragraph has devices injected into each one. And these rhetorical devices that are listed in the table above help to give a more solid and vivid explanation of the meaning that he wants to convey. The gift of imagination and its poetic side found its way into a literal text and it has really served its purpose.
Let’s first analyze all the examples of anaphoras. In the following sentences, we can see the first words and/or sentences repeated in a consecutive sentence or sentences.
They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; regain faith when there seems to be little reason for faith; to create hope when hope turns sad. In these sentences of paragraph 4, the preposition ‘to’ is repeated which introduces other sentences in the sentence.
The same concept applies in paragraph 5, where ‘that’ is repeated. Unfortunately, I don’t have that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, or that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all they mean.
Here are other highlighted inflections:
The unbelievers will say that they are nothing more than words, more slogan, more bombastic phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and I am sorry to say, a few others of an entirely different character, will try to degrade you to the point of mockery and ridicule.
But here are some of the things they do: They build your basic character. They mold them for their future roles as custodians of the nation’s defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid. They teach you to be proud and uncompromising in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for actions, not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and stimulation of difficulty and challenge; learn to rise in the storm but have compassion on those who fall; dominate yourself before trying to dominate others; have a clean heart, a high goal; learn to laugh, but never forget how to cry; reach for the future but never neglect the past; be serious but never take yourself too seriously; be modest so that you remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength
They give you a temperament of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness from the deep sources of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. . They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unshakable hope of what’s next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you how to be an officer and a gentleman.
And what kind of soldiers are you going to lead? They are truthful? They are brave? Are they capable of victory?
In the second sentence of paragraph 4, Diacope, the repetition of one or more words after the interval of one or more words in a sentence, is applied. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; regain faith when there seems to be little reason for faith; to create hope when hope turns sad.
And finally, the first sentence of the same paragraph is an example of Symploce, which is the combination of Anaphora and Epistrophe, the repetition of the first and last words. Duty, Honor, Country: Those three sacred words reverently dictate what you should be, what you can be, what you will be.