Realist writers attempted to establish the 'reality' of the world and all of its flaws, mishaps, and darkness. Where people see beauty, they see flaws and therefore mock a more positive outlook. They used a plethora of rhetorical devices, one of the most common being symbolism. In order to relate topics to one another, symbolism is effective in carrying messages, some hidden and others very obvious. Take T.S. Eliot's realism poem "Wasteland," for example. He uses symbolism all throughout to speak messages of earlthy decay in London, specificallythe politicsbehind the Industrial Revolution where children became mere servants to factories. In lines 14-16 Eliot says, "Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,/ (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)/ Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks." The Phenician Sailor is a symbol of Phlebas; Phlebas and Belladonna have the same symbolic character and are related to Shakespeaere's play The Tempest. In The Tempest, tragedy strikes with the death and shipwreck, not unlike the tragedy that befell London during the Industrial Revolution. Other rhetorical devices used by realist writers are allusion and parallelism, again with the purpose of compelling readers to see certain truths and lies about the politics in their world.
