Figure of speech. The newsboy who invades the office
protests that he was not responsible: "— It wasn't me,
sir. It was the big fellow shoved me, sir." This
unremarkable-sounding utterance embodies the rhetorical
principle of symploce: repeating one word or phrase at
the beginning of successive sentences or clauses, and another
at the end.
Symploce
(SIM-plo-kee or SIM-plo-see, from Greek
sym- = together
+
plekein = to weave, so an "interweaving") combines
anaphora
and
epistrophe.
Gideon Burton (rhetoric.byu.edu) cites its use by the Athenian
orator Aeschines: "Against yourself you are calling him, against
the laws you are calling him, against the democratic
constitution you are calling him." Among literary texts, Richard
Nordquist (thoughtco.com/symploce-rhetoric-1692013) quotes from
T. S. Eliot's
Prufrock ("The yellow fog that rubs its
back upon the window-panes, / The yellow smoke that rubs its
muzzle on the window-panes...") and Shakespeare's
Measure
for Measure:
Most strange, but yet most truly, will I speak:
That Angelo's forsworn, is it not strange?
That Angelo's a murderer, is't not strange?
That Angelo is an adulterous thief,
An hypocrite, a virgin-violator,
Is it not strange? and strange? (5.1.37-42)
In contrast to such stirring eloquence, the newsboy's
repetition of "It was" and "me, sir" is so
ordinary as to escape notice. Gilbert, the first to detect
the artificial construction, nevertheless seems to misname it.
He calls it epanaphora, defining that device as the
"combined use of Anaphora and Epiphora." The word
epanaphora is sometimes used as a synonym for anaphora, but
never (as far as I can tell) for symploce.
