This amazing entrance, highly effective in its abrupt, staccato sentence fragments, violates every “proper” form of address. Coppe begins, in a tone of knowing and paternal benevolence, with “My Deare One.” The next address – “All or none” – implies a supreme indifference as to who in particular might be listening. Shifting again to “Every one under the Sunne,” Coppe in five words levels all social distinctions. His fond “Mine own,” like “My Deare One,” seems to presume an almost omniscient knowledge of the reader, a knowledge that confers possession. It is a mode of address that seemingly incorporates its interlocutors, whether they will or no, into its own world.

Coppe's rhetoric is more precisely seen, however, as deliberately mediating between two apparently incommensurable worlds.