It was revealed to me
It
was revealed to me
In Brief
Figure of speech. Listening to John F. Taylor's
speech, Stephen hears a sentence about the Egyptian high
priest, "I heard his words and their meaning was
revealed to me," and responds with a sentence of
interior monologue: "It was revealed to me that those things
are good which yet are corrupted which neither if they were
supremely good nor unless they were good, could be corrupted."
Rhetoricians call this anadiplosis: taking a word or
phrase from the end of one clause and starting the following
clause with it.
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Pronounced AN-uh-dih-PLO-sis, this word compounded of Greek ana- = again + diploun = to double means simply "to duplicate." The device can tie two clauses together in a web of similar significance, as in these lines from Yeats' An Irish Airman Foresees His Death: "The years to come seemed waste of breath, / Waste of breath the years behind." Or it may propel one idea on into another, creating forward movement, as in these lines from Shakespeare's Richard II: "The love of wicked men converts to fear, / That fear to hate, and hate turns one or both / To worthy danger and deserved death."No real forward motion occurs after Stephen's "It was revealed to me." The mention of an Egyptian priest's words make him idly recall words from a Christian cleric. He appears to be following through on the thought that he had a moment earlier while anticipating the next quotation from Taylor's speech: "Noble words coming. Look out. Could you try your hand at it yourself?" The answer to that question, for the moment at least, seems to be No. Just as his efforts at composing a poem have produced only uninspired variations on a theme by Douglas Hyde, his stab at rhetorical grandeur amounts to nothing more than calling up some words from a great orator of the early Christian church: "Ah, curse you! That's saint Augustine." Stephen's creative forward motion will come at the end of Aeolus, when he turns his energies to prose fiction.
Anadiplosis has much in common with chiasmus, but instead of doubling back on itself (ABBA) it introduces a new linguistic element (ABBC). When a chain of such figures is used (AB,BC,CD...), as in the Shakespeare lines quoted above or the poem reproduced here, it lends itself to another figure of speech: climax.
Source: hazlittblog.wordpress.com.