We will now take up
SCHEMES as the second broad class of English figures of speech. They consist of four groups based on degree of deviation from normal word arrangements:
structures of balance,
changes in word order,
omissions, and
repetitions.
The
structures of balance include
parallelism, which draws power from the structural similarity of pairs or series of words, phrases, or clauses:
“How soon the flame of love can die, /How soon good night becomes goodbye...” (
How Soon, Mancini and Stillman); the
isocolon, a series of similarly structured elements of the same length: “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.” (Charles V); the
tricolon, three parallel elements of the same length put together:
“Veni, vedi, veci”* (Julius Caesar); the
antithesis, which juxtaposes contrasting ideas, often in parallel: “Action, not words!”; and the
climax, which arranges words, phrases, or clauses in decreasing importance, also often in parallel:
“One equal temper of heroic hearts, /Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will /To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” (
Ulysses, Alfred Tennyson).
Changes in word order include the
anastrophe,
parenthesis, and
apposition. The
anastrophe inverts the natural order of words:
“Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear, /And best distinguish’d by black, brown, or fair” (
To A Lady, Alexander Pope); the
parenthesis inserts a verbal unit to interrupt normal syntactical flow:
“This is one of the things I wasn’t prepared for—the amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing” (Essay, Margaret Atwood); and the
apposition adds an adjacent, coordinate, and explanatory element to a statement:
“Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil: the Lord reward him according to his works” (
The Bible, II Tim. 4:14-15).
Omission is the class of schemes that excludes words from normal speech for brevity and quick delivery. Its most common forms are the
ellipsis, the
asyndeton, the
brachylogia, and the
polysyndeton. The
ellipsis omits a word or words readily implied by context:
“And he to England shall [go] along with you” (
Hamlet, Shakespeare). The
asyndeton omits conjunctions between a series of clauses:
“I have found the warm caves in the woods, [and] filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, [and] innumerable goods.” (
Her Kind, Anne Sexton).
The
brachylogia omits conjunctions between a series of words: “Love, hate, jealousy, frenzy, fury drew him from pity” (
Angel Day, Renaissance writer). The
polysendeton, a related but functionally different scheme, involves inclusion rather than omission and abundantly uses conjunctions for more fluid delivery:
“And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it, /And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it...” (
It’s a Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, Bob Dylan).
Repetition provides not only emphasis but artfully and purposively reaaranges words for rhythm and easier retention. The most common are
alliteration,
assonance,
polyptoton,
antanaclasis,
anaphora,
epistrophe,
epanalepsis,
anadiplosis,
antimetabole, and
chiasmus.
Alliteration repeats initial or medial consonants in two or more adjacent words: “Ah, bellissimo; belligerent bella donnas bearing news” (Feature headline,
The Sydney Morning Herald).
Assonance repeats similar vowel sounds, preceded and followed by different consonants, in the stressed syllables of adjacent words:
“The bows glided down, and the coast /Blackened with birds took a last look /At his thrashing hair and whale-blue eye /The trodden town rang its cobbles for luck” (
Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait, Dylan Thomas).
Much as I wanted to wind up this discussion of schemes now, space limitations have obliged me to defer taking up the remaining eight forms to next week's column to give readers a more adequate introduction to these very expressive forms of rthetoric.
A Happy New Year to all my readers and members of Jose Carillo’s English Forum! --------------------
*Latin for “I came, I saw, I conquered.”This essay, 2078th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the December 30, 2021 Internet edition of The Manila Times,
© 2021 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. It is a condensed version of two expositions totaling 1,641 words, “Deeper Devices for Rhetoric” and “More Schemes and Wordplay,” that first appeared in the author's “English Plain and Simple” column in The Manila Times
and that later formed part of his book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today's Global Language
(Manila Times Publishing Corp., first edition 2004, and second updated edition 2008). All rights reserved.Read this article online in
The Manila Times:
“Schemes and fancier forms of wordplay- 1”(Next week:
Schemes and fancier forms of wordplay – 2) January 6, 2022
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
