[uh-nas-truh-fee] 
| inversion of the usual order of words. |
| a·nas·tro·phe (ə-nās'trə-fē) n. Inversion of the normal syntactic order of words; for example, "Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear" (Alexander Pope). [Late Latin anastrophē, from Greek, from anastrephein, to turn upside-down : ana-, ana- + strephein, to turn; see streb(h)- in Indo-European roots.] |
anastrophe
in literary style and rhetoric, the syntactic reversal of the normal order of the words and phrases in a sentence, as, in English, the placing of an adjective after the noun it modifies ("the form divine"), a verb before its subject ("Came the dawn"), or a noun preceding its preposition ("worlds between"). Inversion is most commonly used in poetry in which it may both satisfy the demands of the metre and achieve emphasis:In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure dome decree(from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan")
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