For January: Dreams and Repetitions

In this month of the inauguration of a new president of our country, it seems particularly appropriate and important to study the orators of our great nation who called out for freedoms we enjoy. Reading the words of Dr. King, Thomas Jefferson and Barack Obama, we can experience the power of repeating the same phrases at the beginning of a series of sentences. This is called “anaphora” from the Greek meaning “a carrying up or back” and the words that follow the repeated phrases carry forward.

Anaphora offers an organizing strategy that allows the accumulation of images and information. With these repetitions, words gather power and resonance and compel the reader or listener to rise to ever higher to a new level of consciousness and feeling.

Here are examples of this power and beauty, followed by a writing exercise to help you incorporate this poetic strategy into your writing, whether that is poetry or prose.

If you have not recently read Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which is often anthologized in texts as an example of persuasive writing, you can find the complete speech here.  As he builds toward the climax of his speech, how stunningly Dr. King uses repetition of a phrase that most poignantly speaks to the sadness that a whole people living in “the land of freedom” must still dream of freedom.

Here is an excerpt:

I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor’s lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

Dr. King ends his speech utilizing a repetition of another phrase, one that has particular resonance because it, the phrase “Let freedom ring,” comes from one of our country’s most patriotic songs, “Our Country Tis of Thee,” a rewrite of “God Save the King” to show how pleased Americans were and remain for their independence and freedom to the pursuit of happiness.

Here is King’s ending:

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

Other leaders who have had to stir a nation have relied on anaphora. When he penned the “Declaration of Independence,” Thomas Jefferson itemized the offenses of King George III against the colonists.

Each of his sentences begins with, “He has.”

He has refused his Assent to Laws…

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws…

He has refused to pass other Laws …

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual…

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly…

He has refused for a long time…

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice…

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone…

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither …

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies…

He has affected to render the Military independent …

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction…

In the next section of the “Declaration of Independence,” Jefferson uses anaphora again, this time repeating the word “For” followed by a participle:

For cutting…

For imposing…

For depriving…

For transporting…

For abolishing…

Next, Jefferson resumes the “He has” litany for five sentences.  To end his writing, he includes another litany about the people of the colonies. He writes, “we have” three times followed by past tense verbs:

We have warned…

We have reminded…

We have appealed…

Repetitions have hypnotic power.

Walt Whitman, another American, who was famously involved as a nurse for the Northern troops during the Civil War, used the power of anaphora in many of his poems.

Here is an excerpt from “American Feuillage“:

AMERICA always!
Always our own feuillage!
Always Florida’s green peninsula! Always the priceless delta of Louisiana! Always the cotton-fields of Alabama and Texas!
Always California’s golden hills and hollows—and the silver mountains of New Mexico! Always soft-breath’d Cuba!
Always the vast slope drain’d by the Southern Sea—inseparable with the slopes drain’d by the Eastern and Western Seas;
The area the eighty-third year of These States—the three and a half millions of square miles;
The eighteen thousand miles of sea-coast and bay-coast on the main—the thirty thousand miles of river navigation,
The seven millions of distinct families, and the same number of dwellings—Always these, and more, branching forth into numberless branches;
Always the free range and diversity! always the continent of Democracy!
Always the prairies, pastures, forests, vast cities, travelers, Kanada, the snows;
Always these compact lands—lands tied at the hips with the belt stringing the huge oval lakes;
Always the West, with strong native persons—the increasing density there—the habitans, friendly, threatening, ironical, scorning invaders;
All sights, South, North, East—all deeds, promiscuously done at all times,
All characters, movements, growths—a few noticed, myriads unnoticed,

Four phrases start with “always” and then Whitman breaks for three that start with “the” and then four more that start with “always” again. The power of repetition works well with this change and return. Reading these words, I am passionate, too, as Whitman was that a united and glorious diversity will hold true during the already divisive times we are experiencing this month.

After winning the Democratic presidential primary in South Carolina, our outgoing two-term President, Barack Obama, wrote this in a speech before South Carolinians:

I did not travel around this state over the last year and see a white South Carolina or a black South Carolina.

I saw South Carolina.

I saw crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children alike.

I saw shuttered mills and homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from all walks of life and men and women of every color and creed who serve together and fight together and bleed together under the same proud flag.

I saw what America is and I believe in what this country can be. That is the country I see.

Rebecca Hazelton writes about Obama’s use of Anaphora in her article “Adventures in Anaphora.” She says, “The repetition of ‘I saw’ transforms the speaker into a witness, both to the difficulties facing South Carolina (crumbling schools, shuttered mills, homes for sale) and to the potential of those South Carolinians and, by extension, America. In this way, the speaker becomes not just a witness but an oracle, seeing what America is and what it could be.”

With anaphora, the sameness at the start of each line keeps us riveted and at the same time incites a passion toward action.  The repeated sound meets the expectations of our ears and sets us up to hear what’s next. After each repetition, come new words that arouse by adding ideas, facts, and images. We are both riveted and going places, lulled and aroused, one with the subject and moved to deeper feeling.

When I was steeped in my study of Whitman, I wrote a poem that relies on anaphora to keep it (and me when I wrote it) traveling down the page:

Poetry

You have refused to come to me when I have called you directly;
You have come joking in a fool’s rhymes when you did appear;
You have dropped phrases leaving me to find the puzzle they complete;
You have distracted me from living the way others think I ought to;
You have ignited desire in me when boredom was the companion I thought I preferred;
You have made me cry in public and left me speechless in front of students;
You have come to me unbidden in the mail, on bus placards and city steps,
hooking my eyes and reeling me in until I flutter and gasp;
You have made me search you out in books I’d never heard of;
You have made me a lover of frogs in ancient China,
a collector of words I like the sound of like anticubital and eczematous.
You have widened my circle of friends to old men in Chile and young girls in Greece.
And you have made as foreigners those closer to home who don’t understand the calling.

I have reminded you I must earn a living;
I have asked you to wait so I can sleep, rolling away from pad and lighted pen;
I have turned my head when watching television or reading Sunday’s Parade;
I have sometimes committed to organizations hoping deadlines and databases would keep you away;
I have refused to watch a sunrise, forgotten to walk by the ocean, not named the feel of a dolphin’s skin.
I have turned your corners down like hotel bedsheets and never returned.

Yet there are no vows that I can break with you, my fated life companion;
you who are hidden under armor and naked in a waterfall,
you who are gathered in flour sacks and geodes of amethyst,
you who are afraid of light like rock crabs and as sighted as eagles,
you who are unheld as shooting stars and harvested like pinion nuts,
you who are both ocean’s ethereal spindrift and muscles of dangerous undertow.
The journey generated by anaphora allowed me to move along telling a story by trusting that the emotional meaning of my words would come through as my editorial brain was freed from having to use connective tissue to make sense and my intuitive image-making mind could take over using sound to invite pattern and pattern to generate true feeling.

I confess that to begin, I thought about poetry itself as a tyrant and about reasons I might try to declare myself free of poetry’s power to make me sit down and consider the things others move past. I thought that strategy might provide a little twist to get started after reading the wonderful work I was reading and feeling intimidated by.

There are many impossible-to-truly-separate-from parts of one’s life, parts that you love but parts that also leave you sometimes weary.  In my poem, I use “you have,” “I have,” and “who are” as repeated phrases and try to get some of my feelings about being a poet onto the page. I stay with each phrase as long as I feel I have images to sustain my lines.  Then I change to the next phrase and stay with that one until I felt complete. I use three phrases to repeat in the poem because one of my models, Jefferson, used three. I titled my work “Poetry” because that title lets the reader know what I am speaking about.

If I had chosen the antics of a beloved spouse that annoyed me, the begonias on my porch for which I felt responsible, or the email I never ignore, I would have used those subjects as titles.

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Try your hand at writing with anaphora. You might write a speech out of the mouth of a character you are developing or you might write a speech of your own on a topic you feel passionate about or even write a letter or an apology to someone living or dead using anaphora.

If you would like to, email me a copy of what you have generated on the page.  I would like to share some results with readers and help everyone use anaphora as a tool for generating writing as well as for shaping lyric poems and essays.

Alternatively, write a few lines in the comment box below.