Oskar Wilde is famous poet as well as a playwright and his prose works are not less poetic than his poetry. Salome play is full of metaphoric, lyrical elements. The one extended metaphor that longs the whole play is the relation between Salome and moon.
The line of Herod are:
Has she not a strange look? She is like a mad woman, a mad woman who is seeking everywhere for lovers. She is naked too. She is quite naked. The clouds are seeking to clothe her nakedness, but she will not let them. She shows herself naked in the sky. She reels through the clouds like a drunken woman I am sure she is looking for lovers. Does she not reel like a drunken woman? She is like a mad woman, is she not?
He is enchanted by this object, from the lines itself it is not clear is he talking about the moon or a woman. The constant repetitions of ‘she’ make Herod sound like a poet. There are also alternation between long and rather short sentences that create specific rhythmic pattern. Other repetitions like ‘mad woman’, ‘drunken woman’ and ‘naked’ or ‘nakedness’ also make him sound more epic. His words are extremely dramatized. His lines start and finish in a questions, quite rhetorical questions like ‘has she not’ and ‘does she not’,‘is she not’, these sentences are inverted, which also adds to the poetic effect of the lines, makes them sound more elevated and magnified.
The poetic effect created by the lines emphasize them and makes the reader treat them as more meaningful, as they are said by Herod, they sound like prediction he sees in the sky, it makes him look very perceptible to the beauty of things and their quality.
There is also hostility to his words in the lines of Herodias:
No; the moon is like the moon, that is all. Let us go within You have nothing to do here.
She sounds very colloquial, the opposite of poetic, which also forces the previous lines to stant out in contrast.
Works cited
Wilde, Oskar. Salome. The Project Gutenberg. 12 May 2013. Web, 1 April 2016.
<http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42704/42704-h/42704-h.htm>
