A Play with Words!

Poetry is that beautiful play of words, emotions and meter - the choice and placement of words to best bring out the sentiment of the poet. It’s fascinating how words that we take for granted could suddenly exhibit a hue of emotion unknown to us; or how by the choice of its placement it can change the impact that it usually carries with it.

Who can forget the beautiful ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ by Lord Alfred Tennyson, where he uses the repetition of ‘days that are no more’ at the close of each stanza to indicate the heightened sense of grief, in a variation of the anaphora known as epistrophe, where the echo is used at the end of the phrase instead of the start (as in the case of anaphora)?

Walt Whitman, too, in his ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’, has put to good use the concept of anaphora!

To fulfill my long cherished desire of learning ‘kathak’ I recently put up a request, on a social networking site, that read : 'Baavare se pair chahen, baavare tarano ke, baavare se bol pe thirakhana...' Anybody knows of a kathak teacher in North Bangalore? I wanna try my feet at it!

Unfortunately the use of the lines from a song that I love distracted people from the main point!

And when poetry and music come together, the effect can be spellbinding.

Here is song that uses the literary device of antanaclasis, the repetition of a word/phrase to effect a different meaning.

‘meri jaan..’

This is an example of the simpler device of anaphora, the repetition of a word/phrase at the beginning of every clause.

‘baavara man..’