Diacope

Diacope is a rhetorical term meaning repetition of a word or phrase with one or two intervening words. It derives from a Greek word meaning "cut in two".^[1]

Examples

• "Put out the light, and then put out the light."–Shakespeare, Othello, Act V, scene 2.
• "A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!—Richard III
• "Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in for me!— Talbot Rothwell, Carry on Cleo
• "They will laugh, indeed they will laugh, at his parchment and his wax."

(Edmund Burke, "A Letter to a Noble Lord," 1796)

• "I knew it. Born in a hotel room—and goddamn it—died in a hotel room."

(last words of playwright Eugene O'Neill)

• "Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did."—Dr William Butler (1535-1618), on strawberries, quoted by Izaak Walton in The Compleat Angler.^[2]
• Leo Marks's poem "The Life That I Have",^[3] memorably used in the film Odette, is an extended example of diacope:

The life that I have

Is all that I have

And the life that I have

Is yours.

The love that I have

Of the life that I have

Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have

A rest I shall have

Yet death will be but a pause.

For the peace of my years

In the long green grass

Will be yours and yours and yours.

The first line in the poem not to deploy diacope is the one about death being "a pause."

• "In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these."—Paul Harvey. This is also an example of an epanalepsis.

See also

• Epizeuxis
• Tmesis

References