Rhetorical figures: anaphora and friends

The repetition figures are the load-bearing beams of English public oratory. Anaphora — beginning successive clauses with the same words — is the most famous, and for good reason: it creates a rhythm the audience can anticipate, a rhythm that cumulates without saturating, a rhythm that turns a list into a crescendo. Its siblings — epistrophe, anadiplosis, symploke — do related work with different placements of the repeated element.

In American prose and speech, these figures have a particular history. They are the bones of the Black church homiletic tradition that shaped Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama, and a long line of preachers whose cadence has become the cadence of American political peroration. They are also the bones of the King James Bible, which seeded the rhythm into American prose long before the twentieth century — Lincoln’s of the people, by the people, for the people is a Biblical cadence as much as a classical one.

For the Russian-speaking C2 student, the technical risk is over-deployment. Russian rhetorical tradition, especially the Soviet and post-Soviet civic register, can lean heavily on triadic repetition; in English the same heaviness reads as bombast. The American ear wants three iterations, four at the outside, and rarely more — and wants them earned by what preceded.

Theory: the family tree

Aristotle treats these under lexis (style); Quintilian gives them their Greek names in the Institutio. The names matter less than the ear; what matters is to feel the difference between repetition that builds and repetition that drones.

Anaphora — the workhorse

Anaphora repeats the opening words of consecutive clauses or sentences. The repetition is short — usually two to four words — and the body of each clause varies. The figure has two simultaneous effects: it creates anticipation (the ear waits for the repeated phrase) and accumulation (each new clause adds to the previous without resetting).

The most studied anaphora in American oratory is the I have a dream passage of King’s August 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Here is a representative stretch, as transcribed and as he delivered it (the punctuation reflects spoken pause):

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Note what the anaphora is doing. The repeated I have a dream that one day is the rhythmic frame; what varies is the specificity of the vision — first the nation abstractly, then Georgia, then Mississippi, then the speaker’s own four children. The figure moves from the general to the intimate without breaking rhythm. The ear is held by the repetition; the imagination is led by the variation. This is anaphora working at its full register.

Note also that King does not over-deploy. The I have a dream anaphora runs for eight repetitions and then stops; the speech moves to a different figure (With this faith — another anaphora) for its conclusion. A skilled orator does not run a single figure to the audience’s saturation point.

Lincoln’s we cannot

The Gettysburg Address opens with a periodic sentence and closes with one of the most economical perorations in the language. In its middle sits a tight anaphora:

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate — we cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow — this ground.

Three repetitions of we cannot, and each verb intensifies the one before: dedicate (set apart), consecrate (make sacred), hallow (treat as holy). The figure is what Quintilian would call climax superimposed on anaphora: each iteration raises the stakes. Two hundred and seventy-two words in the whole Address; ten of them are this anaphora. Lincoln knew what he was doing.

Obama’s Yes we can

The November 2008 Iowa caucus victory speech and the New Hampshire concession a few weeks later turned Yes we can — itself borrowed from the United Farm Workers’ Sí se puede — into a closing anaphora that ran through a list of historical moments. The figure was the same as King’s, with the rhythmic frame shorter (three words) and the variation in each clause supplied by a historical pivot. By the end of the campaign, the phrase had become so identified with the speaker that it could carry a single utterance — but at its first deployment, in cold rooms in New Hampshire, the figure built across six or seven iterations before resolving.

Epistrophe — the closing echo

Epistrophe puts the repetition at the end of successive clauses. The most famous American example is the close of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:

…that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

This is epistrophe in miniature: three prepositional phrases ending in the people. The figure makes the human collective the terminus of each clause, the point each phrase arrives at. The grammatical effect is to make the people the rhythmic resting place; the rhetorical effect is to assert that government’s purpose is in fact the people and not the apparatus of state. A speech argued in the cumulative shape of its sentences.

A longer epistrophe runs through James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” (1963), where the repeated terminal phrase that we are now in danger of anchors a paragraph on the moral cost of American silence on race. Baldwin’s epistrophe is rarely as visible as Lincoln’s because his sentences are longer and the repetition is set further apart, but the figure is the same.

Anadiplosis and climax — the chained chain

Anadiplosis takes the last word of one clause and uses it to open the next. A famous (if non-American) example is the chain attributed by George Lucas to the Jedi Master Yoda but assembled from classical and modern rhetorical material:

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

When the chain extends through three or more links, the figure becomes climax (Greek klimax, “ladder”). In American oratory, Jesse Jackson’s 1984 Democratic National Convention address used a long climax to take the audience from one stage of an argument to the next, each new clause picking up the last word of the previous.

A literary instance: in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), a passage describing Sethe’s escape uses a tight anadiplosis: the chain of clauses turns each new step into a consequence of the one before. The figure works because the content is in fact a chain — each step caused the next. Anadiplosis misfires when it is decorative; it works when the syntax mirrors a real causal sequence.

Symploke — both ends at once

Symploke is the rarest of the four. It repeats the opening words and the closing words of successive clauses, varying only the middle. A representative deployment from a Civil Rights-era sermon:

When there is talk of hate, let us stand up and talk against it. When there is talk of violence, let us stand up and talk against it. When there is talk of despair, let us stand up and talk against it.

The figure works only when the variation in the middle (hate / violence / despair) is meaningful — when each substitution adds to the previous. Used decoratively, symploke becomes a verbal trap, the same sentence three times with one noun changed. Used substantively, it triangulates a target by enumerating its forms.

Production exercise

Write a paragraph of four sentences using a single anaphora. Constraints:

• Repeat a two-to-four-word phrase at the head of each sentence.
• Vary the body of each sentence so that the four sentences move from abstract to specific to one person.
• Do not use a fifth sentence with the same anaphora; resolve into something different.

Sample target rhythm (do not copy):

We talk about freedom in the abstract. We talk about freedom in our classrooms and our pulpits. We talk about freedom in the meeting halls of our parties. We did not talk about freedom in the cell my grandfather sat in, in 1959, in Birmingham.

Read it aloud. If the fourth sentence does not feel inevitable — if the ear is still expecting the figure to continue — the anaphora has not earned its resolution.

When the figures work vs misfire

Common Russian-speaker mistakes

1. Triadic over-deployment. Russian rhetorical tradition tolerates and even rewards long triadic chains. In American prose three iterations is often two too many. We shall, we shall, we shall, we shall, we shall reads as Soviet civic register, not as American oratory. Cap most anaphoras at three or four; reserve longer chains for genuine perorations.
2. Synonymic variation. The Russian-speaker draft often varies the noun by reaching for synonyms (injustice / inequality / oppression). The American convention varies by moving — by scope, time, scale, agent. Same noun, different domain is usually better than different noun, same scope.
3. Latinate vocabulary inside the repetition frame. Anaphora wants short, Anglo-Saxon words at the head of each clause: we will, I have, when there is, this is. A Latinate opener (we shall endeavor to) ruins the rhythm. Saxon openers, Latinate or mixed bodies — that is the working pattern.
4. Punctuation mismatch. Anaphora in American prose is usually marked with a period or a semicolon between iterations, not with commas as in Russian periodic prose. We came; we saw; we conquered — semicolons. We came, we saw, we conquered is the well-known case of asyndetic comma anaphora and works in Caesar, but the modern American default is the period.
5. Anadiplosis applied to non-chain content. The figure requires that the content actually be a chain. Russian rhetorical drafts sometimes apply anadiplosis to lists, which produces a decorative effect with no argumentative payoff.
6. Forgetting to stop. The American convention is that a figure runs until it earns its payoff, then exits. Russian drafts sometimes extend the figure past its natural close, looking for one more beat. The American ear hears that extra beat as failure of taste.

Summary

• Anaphora repeats opening words; epistrophe repeats closing words; symploke repeats both; anadiplosis chains end-to-beginning.
• Variation must move semantically — from general to specific, from past to present, from outside to inside.
• Three to four iterations is the modern American working range; longer chains require unusual content density.
• The figures live in American oratory through King, Lincoln, Obama, Baldwin, Morrison — read them aloud to internalize the rhythm.
• Saxon words at the repetition points; Latinate vocabulary inside the variation if at all.
• A figure that runs past its payoff loses the audience; stop one beat sooner than instinct says.

Next lesson: Rhetorical figures: balance and contrast — chiasmus, antithesis, parallelism, isocolon, antimetabole — the figures that organize sentences around opposition and reflection.