Monday, November 8, 2010

Name that Rhetorical Device! and some links

As I look at my post on "Fern Hill" again, I see that I was trying to express how the word "sea" is contained in "easy" and "mercy," so that it seems to emerge of necessity. "easy...mercy...sea." Mer-sea. Ain't I clever! But I have been tallying up instances of this device for a while. Does anyone know if it has a name? Here are three examples:
Her earliest stars, earl-stars, stars principal, overbend us - Hopkins

Omnipresence, equilibrium, brim. - Seamus Heaney

egret, killdeer, bittern, tern. - Robert Hass


Interview with AE Stallings, and three eery new poems.

I would really like to read what Victor Segovia wrote when he was trapped in the mine.

Coolest poet name ever. And she gives good review-writing advice.

The new musicality.

If you haven't seen the ongoing poetry articles in the Atlantic Monthly, here is the series so far: 1,2, 3.

And a little treat from My Mom the Style Icon: a dress with an Alan Ginsberg poem on it.

6 comments:

some guy on the street said...

Hmm... I'd love to express it as some form of echo --- I think when I did my last accademic poetry (ten years! oh my!) we had internal rhyme for rhymes that were reaching out from between the middle of words, wherever they sat. "Internal echo" maybe?

But there should be a better word for it. Something more like "gondola", or "willow".

Dr. Thursday said...

They remind me of Rush's song "Anagram" (on their album called "Presto"... it contains some amazing anagrammatic links such as those: "There's a snake coming out of the darkness, rain in Paradise... He and she are in the house but there's only me at home."

Perhaps an "entolog" (roughly, the word within)?

some guy on the street said...

There's also a nice thing about "mer-cy" in that "mer" is also "sea"...

Meredith said...

Dr. Thursday: That makes me want to write an anagram poem, even if it's already been done. "entolog" pleases me. The phenomenon could be entologia.

Richard Wilbur wrote a children's book called "The Pig in the Spigot" which is all about such words:

When there’s a pig inside your spigot, you
Must not cry out, “There’s nothing I can do!”
Be sensible, and take the obvious course,
Which is to turn the spigot on full force.
Sufficient water pressure will, I think,
Oblige the pig to flow into the sink.

some guy: My goodness, you're right! This is getting downright Joycean.

Dr. Thursday said...

M: thanks; I liked that pig/spigot thing; I will have to watch for it.

Is that "mercy" the kind that isn't strained, or is it the kind that goes with Doats? (You know mer-sea doats and doe-sea doats.)

That's another curious thing: words of the form AB (as we say in computer theory) where
the meanings of A and of B are the "same" but A is in another language from B... Ah, maybe a homopolylog? Oy.

Incidentally, I goofed that quote from Rush. It should say "parade from paradise" - I don't know how I distorted it into "rain" which is not anagrammatic.

I would like to see your anagrammatic poem when you do it. Perhaps I ought to try one of my own.

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