Children's Fiction: Hans Christian Andersen

I try to read one fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen a day. Some of them are better than others ("The Flying Trunk" - good, "Little Shuteye" - not so good). The one I want to analyze for this post is "The Little Mermaid," which is actually nothing at all like the Disney movie. It's darker. She doesn't get her prince in the end, the sisters try to convince her to murder him, and instead of magically losing her voice, the witch cuts off her tongue. It has a gracious ending though, in which she basically gets to be an angel because of her selflessness and isn't cursed to hell like the rest of her kind.

There is a lot of rich language in the story, and I'm going to analyze it by highlighting the imagery,  anastrophe, and parallelism.

The little mermaid drew back the purple curtain from the tent door and saw the lovely bride asleep with her head on the prince's breast; and, stooping down, she kissed him on his beautiful forehead, looked up at the sky where the dawn was growing brighter and brighter, looked at the sharp knife, and again turned her gaze on the prince, who murmured in his dreams the name of his bride. She alone was in his thoughts, and the hand which held the knife trembled. But then all at once she threw it far into the waves, which shone red where it fell, as though drops of blood were trickling from the water. Once more she looked, with half-glazed eyes, at the prince; then she plunged into the sea, feeling her body melt into foam as she did so.