Symploce

Symploce is a complex stylistic figure of repetition combining anaphora and epiphora: adjacent segments of speech have identical beginnings and identical endings, while the middle changes each time. Symploce creates a double framing of the utterance, lending it a marked rhythmic symmetry and heightened emotional insistence. Owing to the simultaneous repetition of openings and closings, it is especially effective in oratorical speech, folk song, incantations and lyric of an incantatory type, where rhythmicised accumulation reinforces the persuasiveness or magical action of the word. Symploce belongs to the figures of expressive syntax and demonstrates how the means of repetition can combine to form more complex structures of the rhythmic-syntactic organisation of a literary text.