Elements of Eloquence Single Line Challenge, Chapters 18, 19 and 20: Syllepsis, Isocolon and Enallage
This brings our single-line challenge to the halfway point! I hope we’ve been floating like a butterfly through these challenges. It’s supposed to be fun, low-pressure, no fear of failure, just a learning experience. That’s why we’re writing lines only, instead of whole poems.
That and we’re publishing a book of the best poems to be offered across our writing challenges, and we can’t finish the last challenge or write the last poem until we’ve explored all 38 rhetorical figures in our textbook: The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth.
I’ll be down in the comments section soon, writing single lines that embody – and perhaps even combine – these three very interesting rhetorical figures. Please join me!
Slow Literature 
The twenty-thousand dollar hazard pay was offered on top of the two hundred thousand dollar contract, and a stack of miscellaneous Christmas cards on the butler’s silver tray.
Be reasonable: I’m the only land agent among your acquaintances. Let the house, and let me represent it.
Your father made me promise to keep you safe, Miss Margaret. If you get into that sleigh, I’ll get into trouble.
You follow your nose, and I’ll follow last year’s winner. May the laziest man win the bet.
My flight would not wait, and I had failed to explain myself to her satisfaction. And so I ran out of time, her house, and chances.
While the bombmaker sat secure in his bunker, running down the clock, I frenzied myself in Baltimore’s alleys, running down clues.
Make all the sprinkled sparks of swimming night
in everlasting lines sprint out of sight
out of the Universe whose sightless border
folds from fencing nothing into central nowhere
out of well-watched being into maybeing
primordial parenthood to foundling babying
(Syllepsis)
LikeLike