Example of Gradation Or Climax

Gradation, also known as climax, is a repetitive figure of speech that affects logic in the understanding of expressions and consists of the ascending or descending progression of the ideas. In other words, the narrative will advance from what is greater in length or magnitude to what is less, or from the most numerous to the least numerous or vice versa.

At first, it only consisted of a chain exclusively that involved words, but as time passed, this Exclusivity was broken and he was mixing concepts of magnitude and shape, starting with a watermelon, going to a melon, from there to an apple and ending with a lemon, in this way the "chain" was still respected but it was not only a list there was this gradation from much to less. All this seen from a semantic and logical point of view because for what may seem large to us in a common plane, perhaps for the eyes of the writer it may seem small. That is, perhaps for a lover the small eyes of his girlfriend are larger than the universe itself, everything is totally subjective, the norm is not respected as it used to be.

However, literary purists believe that the Gradation, as a rhetorical figure applied to strenuous work, is an especially difficult device; its frequent and elaborate use always betrays the highly gifted writer, especially when combined with irony; if it is more, it is called climax; if it is less, anticlimax. In other words, the more elements that are implicit in the use of this resource, the better the work in which it is used will look.

Today, the word climax is used more frequently to denote the climax of the process of accumulating expressive effects that come both from the way of expressing themselves and from the choice and arrangement of other structural elements such as actions, characters, spatial data and temporary. Altogether, it is the exaltation of the narrative, in antiquity given only in the poems.

Examples of Gradation or climax:

Here are some examples of Literary Gradation.

- (...) On the ground, in smoke, in dust, in shadow, in nothing.

Gongora.

As you can see Góngora, master of the Spanish pen in the Spanish Golden Age, makes exquisite use of this figure, beginning from the whole, which is "the earth" as a palpable substance and not like the planet, and it was degrading to nothing, passing through all states that this earth can present itself on the physical plane, in this way the abstract feeling becomes deeper than just saying: "I am nothing".

Here are other examples with the same meaning of existence in gradation:

-The count of hours and days,

of weeks and months the deceptions,

of the years and centuries the persistence,

disappointments should not improve you;

because they will not conquer my cravings

hours, days, weeks, months and years.

Gongora.

-And I think of you more every year, every month, every week, day, hour, my thoughts follow you.

In the same way that it was perceived before, the gradation gives an elegant cut when you know how to use it, and with the mixture of more figures it turns out to be totally exquisite.