Anastrophe

Anastrophe (from the Greek: ἀναστροφή, anastrophē, "a turning back or about") is a figure of speech in which a language's usual word order is inverted: for example, saying "smart you are" to mean "you are smart".

In English, because its natural word order is settled, anastrophe emphasizes the displaced word or phrase. For example, the name of the City Beautiful urbanist movement emphasizes "beautiful"; similarly, in the line "This is the forest primeval" (from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline), "primeval" comes to the fore. Where the emphasis that comes from anastrophe is not an issue, "inversion" is a perfectly suitable synonym.

Yoda from the Star Wars series commonly uses anastrophe.

"Told you, I did. Reckless is he. Now matters are worse."

"Mind what you have learned. Save you it can."

"If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan's apprentice."

Mingella and Blobbelda Winkybunion from the Banjo-Kazooie series use it too.

"Grunty's sisters you should not mock, now watch our magic blast this rock!” -Mingella

"Seen us bony man has. Him we must whack!" -Mingella

"Quickly we must go, or angry Grunty will be!" -Blobbelda

"Big rock is, so powers we must combine!" -Blobbelda

Anastrophe is common in Greek and Latin poetry. For example, in the first line of the Æneid:

Arma virumque cano, Troiæ qui primus ab oris

("I sing of arms and the man, who first from the shores of Troy")

the genitive case noun Troiæ ("of Troy") has been separated from the noun it governs (oris, "shores") in a way that would be rather unusual in Latin prose. In fact, given the liberty of Latin word order, "of Troy" might be taken to modify "arms" or "the man", but it is not the custom to interpret the word that way.

Anastrophe also occurs in English poetry. For example, in the third verse of Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

He holds him with his skinny hand,

"There was a ship," quoth he.

"Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!"

Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

the word order of "his hand dropt he" is not the customary word order in English, even in the archaic English that Coleridge seeks to imitate. However, excessive use of the device where the emphasis is unnecessary or even unintended, especially for the sake of rhyme or metre, is usually^{[citation needed]} considered a flaw; consider the clumsy versification of Sternhold and Hopkins's metrical psalter:

The earth is all the Lord's, with all

her store and furniture;

Yea, his is all the work, and all

that therein doth endure:

For he hath fastly founded it

above the seas to stand,

And placed below the liquid floods,

to flow beneath the land.

However, some poets have a style that depends on heavy use of anastrophe. Gerard Manley Hopkins is particularly identified with the device, which renders his poetry susceptible to parody:

Hope holds to Christ the mind’s own mirror out

To take His lovely likeness more and more.

When anastrophe draws an adverb to the head of a thought, for emphasis, the verb is drawn along too, resulting in a verb-subject inversion:

"Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance" (W. Eugene Smith).

Source: public domain 1913 Webster's Dictionary

References

• Smyth, Herbert Weir (1920). Greek Grammar. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 673–674. ISBN 0-674-36250-0. 

External links

• Figures of rhetoric: Anastrophe