Pardon me if this is tedious, but one of the interesting, or possibly maddening, things about the study of rhetoric is its inherent contradictions. Not so much that the rules of rhetoric disagree with one another, but for a field that’s all about improving your communication, it tends to be couched in obscure, hard-to-remember terminology (remember aposiopesis) and written about as obliquely as anything you’ll encounter. That’s bad, bad, bad for the whole field, and probably a good reason why rhetoric nowhere near as widely known as it was, say, a century or two ago.
Just for example, have a look at the last sentence of the paragraph just above. Repeating a word for emphasis like that? Epizeuxis, that’s what it’s called. It’s perfectly common, it works, and people use it all the time. So as a rhetorical technique, it’s thriving, and has ever since Shakespeare had Richard the Third exclaim “A horse, my kingdom for a horse!”
Just two repetitions qualify as epizeuxis, but some writers have taken it to quite an extreme. Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Bells” repeats “bells” (and some other words) up to seven times in a row, and also uses “bells” to rhyme with… “bells.” This is why Poe is much better known for “The Raven,” who had the sense to just say “nevermore” once at a time. That, of course, and the way “The Bells” starts out all light-hearted and about a pleasant sleigh ride, then progresses to a marriage, and ultimately takes a dark turn to disaster and, I kid you not, ghouls. Ghouls ringing bells, of course, but ghouls.
In fact, when Poe takes bells and turns them from a symbol of happiness to a “moaning and groaning” tolling, he’s coming very close to catachresis. That’s the application of a term to a thing it doesn’t really denote.
There really isn’t any place in “The Bells” that shows off, for example, hysteron proteron, or hypallage. Those are techniques having to do with the sequencing of words — a lot of that Yoda does, hmm? Hysteron proteron is when you take the first word in a figure of speech and use it as the last word instead — like if you were to say “Poe went above and over in ‘The Bells.’” Instead of “over and above,” I mean. Hypallage is swapping the elements of a phrase so that in a different order they are. Yoda could have been named Hypa instead. “Hyperbaton” is almost the same thing; swapping the usual order of words. See a sample in this sentence, you can.
Oh, and I almost forgot. That first sentence, when I point out that I’m going to be tedious, and ask for your pardon before I start? There’s a term in rhetoric for that, too: parrhesia. See? Tedious, tedious, tedious, warned you I did!
