Anastrophe is a figure of speech involving an inversion of the natural order of words; for example, saying "echoed the hills" to mean "the hills echoed". In English, with its settled word order, departure from the expected word order emphasizes the displaced word or phrase: "beautiful" is emphasized in the City Beautiful urbanist movement; "primeval" comes to the fore in Longfellow's line "This is the forest primeval". Where the emphasis that comes from anastrophe is not an issue, "inversion" is a perfectly suitable synonym. A figure of speech, sometimes termed a rhetorical figure or device, or elocution, is a word or phrase that departs from straightforward, literal language. ... The City Beautiful movement was a Progressive reform movement in North American architecture and urban planning that flourished in the 1890s and 1900s with the intent of using beautification and monumental grandeur in cities to counteract the perceived moral decay of poverty-stricken urban environments. ... Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807–March 24, 1882) was an American poet who wrote many poems that are still famous today, including The Song of Hiawatha and Evangeline. ...

Anastrophe is common in Greek and Latin poetry. For example, in the first line of the Æneid: Latin is the language that was originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ... The Aeneid is a Latin epic written by Virgil in the 1st century BC that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who traveled to Italy where he became the ancestor of the Romans. ...

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. The genitive case is a grammatical case that indicates a relationship, primarily one of possession, between the noun in the genitive case and another noun. ... Word order, in linguistic typology, refers to the order in which words appear in sentences across different languages. ...

Anastrophe also occurs in English poetry. For example, in the third verse of Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English poet, 1795 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (October 21, 1772 – July 25, 1834) was an English poet, critic, and philosopher and, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and as one of the Lake Poets. ... Illustration by Gustav Dore. ...

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 considered a flaw; consider the clumsy versification of Sternhold and Hopkins's metrical psalter: In language, an archaism is the deliberate use of an older form that has fallen out of current use. ... A metrical psalter is a kind of Bible translation: a paraphrase of all or part of the Book of Psalms in vernacular poetry, meant to be sung as hymns in a church. ...

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: Gerard Manley Hopkins (July 28, 1844 - June 8, 1889) was a British Victorian poet and Jesuit priest, whose verse has been widely admired for the vividness of its expression. ... In contemporary usage, parody is a form of satire that imitates another work of art in order to ridicule it. ...

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

External links

• Figures of rhetoric: (http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/Figures/A/anastrophe.htm) Anastrophe