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.
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.
