Dear SunWinkers!

Last week, we looked at figures of speech, or rhetorical figures. They included anaphora (beginning a series of sentences or clauses with the same word or phrase), enallage (being effectively ungrammatical), and periphrasis (using more words than you have to).

In previous columns, I’ve talked about the music of poetry. The music of poetry goes back to a day when there was no such thing as music. St. Augustine’s De Musica (“On Music”), written around 390 A.D., actually treated the subject of what we now call poetic meter. Musical melody as we know it today came centuries later, and harmony years after that. So, meter is part of the music of poetry, not strict meter necessarily these days, but the feeling of rhythmic pulses, and meter implied, manipulated, and thwarted.

Diction and alliteration exemplify another aspect of music in poetry. The poet manipulates and takes advantage of the sound of language to make it grating, mellifluous, or narcotic, just as a composer uses harmony to make her music harsh or euphonious.

Finding Arthur Quinn’s book [Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase by Arthur Quinn; Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith Inc., 1982] was an eye-opener for me. The science of rhetoric as an academic requirement was a thing of the past even at Andover in the 1960s, where I took 3 years of Latin. But the subject as presented by Quinn opened up a whole new area of musical technique for me to think about as a poet, one that, oddly, is barely mentioned in most poetry handbooks.

Last week, we talked about several figures involving repetition. The most basic of these, which we actually did not mention last week, is called epizeuxis, which just means repeating a word or phrase immediately. Irina’s response to this column included an epizeuxis:

Fast roll
Roll, roll the barrel

Here are a few more examples:

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

Out, out, damn spot!

Shakespeare Macbeth

A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!

Shakespeare Richard III

There is no there there.

Gertrude Stein

America, America, God shed His grace on thee.

“America the Beautiful” lyric by Katharine Lee Bates

The pat of margarine skitters,
skitters across the frying pan,
the crackling ushering in a day full of promise.

DW “Procrastination”

Tyger! Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night…

William Blake

The Prompt

Write a short poem or short short story and include an example of epizeuxis.

Post your response on your blog or social site (you could create a Note in Facebook, for example).

Comment on this article with a link to your response.

Love,

Doug