Literary Terms

Anastrophe: Inversion of the usual, normal, or logical order of the parts of a sentence. Purpose is rhythm or emphasis or euphony.

Examples:

• "The helmsman steered; the ship moved on; yet never a breeze up blew." from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge

• "Figures pedantical" from Loves Labours Lost by William Shakespeare

• "Long time the manxome foe he sought" from Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll

• "Arms that wrap about a shawl" from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot

• "Our lives upon, to use Our strongest hands" from Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare

• "This is the forest primeval." from Evangeline by Henry Longfellow

• 'Hopkins Hope holds to Christ the mind’s own mirror out' by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Antimetabole: Repetition of words in successive clauses in reverse grammatical order.

Examples:

• "I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better."
  (A. J. Liebling)



• "He cared for nobody, no not he, and nobody cared for him."
  (E.B. White, "Second World War")



• "We didn't land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth Rock landed on us."
  (Malcolm X)



• "Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true."
  (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)



• "It is not how old you are, but how you are old."
  (Jules Renard)