devices

I was on Wikipedia, and began from "metaphor" in whose exact definition and usages my interest was aroused because of the poem I just posted below.

From the familiar realm of literary techniques (the Wiki pages for metonymy, synecdoche etc.), somehow I wandered into linguistics (suddenly, paradiastole). Which surprised me, because I'd always thought before this that I had no (lasting) interest in linguistics or any subject that studied the functioning of a language on a microscopic level.

In the end, though, I suppose they are all tangled together--language and what it forms and what it is formed of. A work of literature may only be beautiful when taken in its entirety--yet that entirety is formed of sections that build tensions between each other, thereby reenacting the world, or a likeness of it--and for those single sections the language is the scaffolding. A simple double entendre, a polysemic word, may set out the story's premise (Richard III anyone?). Some literary pieces are defined by singular sentences of superior linguistic construct, syntactic adroitness, deep dictional understanding. The language is the brick and the idea is the mortar: is that not why I cannot avoid studying the mechanics of the English language if I wish to inch up on any sort of expertise in writing?

Semi-relatedly, I realise I have been engaging all sorts of rhetoric and literary devices without realising that I was doing so. Anaphora is likely my favourite of them, or the non-religious English form of emphatic Semitic triplets.

P.S. paradiastole? As in, "beside the diastole"? And what's this linguistic meiosis?