"He kissed those enticing lips—they could not kiss him back; he caressed her hands, her face—they were unresponsive; he took her in his arms—she remained a cold and passive form."

• Asyndeton (the dashes, commas, and semicolons are used in place of connecting words and help create a tone of desperation by placing everything desperate Pygmalion tries to do to the statue in one sentence without transitions or connections between each phrase/clause)
• Anaphora (the repetition of "he" at the start of each clause help convey the meaning that Pygmalion is the active player in this myth)
• Juxtaposition (the contrast between Pygmalion's desperate actions and the statue's passive lack of response is developed with contrasting words/phrases like "kissed" and "could not kiss")

• "enticing" implies Pygmalion sees the statue not as a real woman but as an object to be desired ("enticing" is usually used to describe objects, like food, i.e., "the enticingly purple grape")
• "cold" implies the statue is both physically and emotionally cold (like an ice queen) despite Pygmalion's desperate advances

"Either he could not dismiss what he so disapproved of from his mind as easily as from his life, or else he was bent on forming a perfect woman and showing men the deficiencies of the kind they had to put up with."

• The word choice isn't as strong as in the rest of the myth. It isn't super clear what Hamilton is trying to say. The ideas all flow together mushily, making it feel like a run-on sentence even though it is properly punctuated.

•  Questions about Pygmalion's motives for forming the quintessentially statuesque woman persist. Perhaps his hatred for women in his real life failed to dampen his predilection for idealizing the female form. Or perhaps he hoped to illustrate, for all mankind, the imperfections in women he felt all men were forced to endure.

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