Dear SunWinkers:

We’ve been talking about a whole ‘nother aspect of the music of poetry: figures of speech, a.k.a. rhetorical figures. Rhetorical figures are ways to manipulate the rhythms of speech to give your poetry or oratory or prose rhythm, momentum, and impact. I just used three of them.

“a whole ‘nother” is a tmesis: splitting a word in two, usually to put another word in between.

“…rhetorical figures. Rhetorical figures…” is an anadiplosis: repeating a word or phrase from the end of a clause or sentence at the beginning of the next.

“poetry or oratory or prose” is polysyndeton: using extra conjunctions (that is, “or” instead of a comma between “poetry” and “oratory”.

We can’t cover all of the 60 figures of speech described in Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase by Arthur Quinn [Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith Inc., 1982]. If you want to get all obsessive over this, I mean, if you want to make a methodical study of this topic, you can get ahold of Quinn’s book or go to a wonderful website called The Forest of Rhetoric http://rhetoric.byu.edu/ which describes many times 60 rhetorical figures.

Many of the figures we’ve looked at are repetitive figures, and I did want to cover a few more of those. The reason is that they are pretty easy to understand, and to get a feeling for how they can improve the rhythm and music of your poetry.

So far, we’ve covered these:

Epistrophe is repeating a word or words at the end of a succession of phrases: “of the people, by the people, for the people” Abraham Lincoln.

Anaphora means repeating a word or words at the beginning of a succession of phrases or sentences: “I am waiting for my case to come up/and I am waiting/for a rebirth of wonder/and I am waiting for someone/to really discover America” Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

The technique of repeating a word or words at the beginning and then the end of a sentence or successive sentences is epanalepsis: “Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.” Marin Luther King, Jr.

The device of repeating a phrase by reversing it is called epanados: “The water drives a wedge/of iron through the iron edge/of the cliff” Marianne Moore. “They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,/You do not play things as they are.’//The man replied, ‘Things as they are/ Are changed upon the blue guitar.’” Wallace Stevens.

Epizeuxis means simply repeating a word or phrase immediately: “A pot. A pot is a beginning of a rare bit of trees.” Gertrude Stein. “There will be time, there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet…” T.S. Eliot.

 

Here are a few more I wanted to throw out before we leave the topic:

We just learned anadiplosis is repeating a word or phrase from the end of a clause or sentence at the beginning of the next: “My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,/Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun” Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Symploce is repeating the beginning and the end of a sentence in the next sentence: “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,/The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,” T.S. Eliot. “She is sweetly there and her curly hair is very lovely/She is sweetly here and I am very near and that is very lovely,” Gertrude Stein.

Isocolon is repeating a parallel grammatical construction: “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.” boxer “Barbados” Joe Walcott. “And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell:” Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Repetitio covers a multitude of sins; it means repeating a word several times with and without an intervening word or two: “Oh Mistress, Mistress,/Reptile mistress,” D.H. Lawrence. “Night, night/Death’s second self/where all is empty, all is despair/All gone, all down/All, all despair/And grey is my true love’s hair” Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

The Prompt

(Let me emphasize one more time: the important thing is to get a sense of the techniques described here so you can incorporate them into your writing, not to memorize the arcane Greek terms for them.)

Write a short poem or short short story using one or more of the devices mentioned above.

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

If your blog is on WordPress, tag the post with Wesun.

Comment on this article with a link to your response. I’ll comment on your response either here or there or both.

Love,

Doug