Anastrophe

Anastrophe (pronounced a-na-stro-phee) is primarily used for its archaic effects. It is frequently used in Shakespeare and other historical poets. It usually involves arranging words in an unexpected order.

Poets who are concerned with traditional prosody often use anastrophe to enhance the sound, pauses, rhythm, and rhymes in their verse. However, in the modern era, the most famous example would be Yoda from Star Wars. For example: “Always with you, it cannot be done.”

Head of Apollo, Greek God of Poetry.

The device works with Yoda because it is played partly for comedic effect. However, if done poorly, anastrophe can have disastrous consequences — It can make you sound like a character from a badly written medieval fantasy novel. If done well, it may have some impressive rhetorical effects.

In this article, I discuss what the effects of anastrophe are, how you can achieve them, and provide numerous examples of anastrophe. Read on to learn more.

What is anastrophe?

Anastrophe is a rhetorical device that occurs when words appear in an unexpected order. As mentioned earlier, it is frequently used by poets for poetic phrasing and to achieve an archaic effect. Here is an example of anastrophe being used in Shakespeare's "Sonnet 29" (1609):

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

       For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

       That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Anastrophe is the least of this poem's merits; however, we do have a few examples of it that are worth noting. In "like him with friends possessed" is an inversion of the adjective possess both in form and meaning. Possess is typically used as a verb, but here it is used as an adjective to describe a "him" with many friends that the poet is envious of.

A normal sentence structure for this idea would look as follows: "Like him who possesses many friends." The strange placement of this adjective gives the line an archaic charm, which may have been effective even at the time of the 17th century in which it was written. The same is true of the phrase "myself almost despising," where the object "myself" is placed early before its verb "despising."

More than that, it displays the poet's skill in fitting the form of his poem to suit his meaning in terms of the traditional rhyming scheme and meter. The word possessed is placed at the end of the line to maintain the rhyming pattern and the iambic pentameter featured in the poem.

Why do writers use Anastrophe?

Writers use anastrophe to achieve several effects. They include the following: 

1. You call attention to words. By placing words in an unusual place, readers will pay more attention to them. Displacing a word and pushing it at the back or front of its usual position would emphasize this word. 

2. Rhythmic effects. Inversion of words may result in an unusual and attractive rhythm. This explains why poets, particularly like anastrophe. 

3. Compressing meaning. With anastrophe, you can pack a lot of meaning into a short phrase. 

4. Suspense. Anastrophe allows you to defer the meaning of a sentence till the end. This has the effect of surprising the reader when the full meaning is delivered. 

Examples of Anastrophe

As mentioned earlier, Shakespeare is famous for using anastrophe. Here is a famous example from Richard II:

BOLINGBROKE. I thought you had been willing to resign.

KING RICHARD: My crown I am; but still my griefs are mine. 

Anastrophe here is in the second line. Instead of saying “I am willing to resign my crown,” King Richard shortens it to “My crown, I am.” This has the effect of compressing the line and allowing Shakespeare to form a rhyming couplet with the rest of the sentence. 

Dickens, Capital Punishment (1846): 

What effects daily increasing familiarity with the scaffold, and with death upon it, wrought France in the Great Revolution, everybody knows. 

This passage from Charles Dickens is a sensational sentence. Normal English sentence patterns resemble Subject — Verb — Object. For example, “Everybody knows how bloody the French Revolution was.”

However, in Dickens’s passage, the subject and the verb are saved until the end of the sentence.  The effect if this device is to emphasize the “horrors” of the French Revolution, as well as to slightly shock the reader with the inversion. 

Below are more examples of anastrophe. The following examples shift the verb to a much earlier position in the sentence to create an effect resting on "the early verb."

Melville, Moby-Dick (1851): 

Whatever other business he has to attend to, waking or sleeping, breathe he must, or die he will. 

Dickens, Little Dorrit (1857):

But it was natural that he should gradually allow himself to be over-persuaded by Clennman, and should yield. Yield he did.

Churchill, Guildhall Address (1914):

Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer.

In Shakespeare and older literature, inversion was frequently used to add denials or negative claims. Below is an example from King Lear and the Bible:

Shakespeare, King Lear, I, I: 

Peace, Kent!

Come not between the dragon and his wrath. 

Acts 3:6:

Then Peter said, Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee.

Anastrophe in modern verse

Anastrophe is frequently used in historical poetry to force lines to rhyme. For example, Wordsworth, A Slumber did my Spirit Seal (1800): 

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

The very first line of the poem begins with an inversion. Instead of “My spirit sealed a slumber” the poet turns the sentence around to “A slumber did my Spirit seal.” There are several reasons for this. The line itself is strange and mysterious, inverted or not. 

However, the inversion makes it seem even more otherworldly and provides the poet the opportunity to make it rhyme with the third line to form a four-line stanza with an ABAB rhyming pattern. The second stanza also begins with an inversion to continue the same rhyming pattern. 

The charms of anastrophe are not lost on modern poets altogether. A famous example of a poem with anastrophe from modern poetry is Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" (1923):

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow. 

Just as with older forms of poetry, the point is to achieve sonorous rhythms and to maintain rhyming schemes. Instead of "I think I know whose wood these are" in the first line, we have "Whose woods these are I think I know." Here the poet places the verb know late at the end of the line to obviously maintain the AABA rhyming scheme of the poem.

However, more than that, this placement has the effect of reproducing natural speech patterns. This is how humans speak to each other or think to themselves. Here is the poet Kendel Hippolyte making use of anastrophe for a similar effect in a modern sonnet written in unpretentious everyday language. 

Kendel Hippolyte, "Suh Jah Sey" (2008): 

Dread song. “Not one of my deed” the words said 

( . . . every time i heard Bob sing) 

“shall sit on your sidewalk and beg your bread.” 

No, Pa, i’d think, never. My eyes would sting. 

The poet quotes a lyric from a Bob Marley song “Not one of my deed” and ends the first line with the subject and verb, “the words said.” The effect is two-fold. It creates an attractive rhythm, while the poet inserts his thoughts between lyrics that continue unto the third line. Lastly, it allows the poet to achieve the traditional rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet. 

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Cite this EminentEdit article

Antoine, M. (2024, September 19). Anastrophe. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/anastrophe