Thoughts on Hyperbaton 

Hyperbaton--I tell my Latin and Greek students--is the rhetorical device whereby an author separates, often by a considerable distance, two words that go together, such as an adjective and the noun it modifies. Each of the separated words thus receives an emphasis it would otherwise lack. 

In inflected languages like Latin and Greek, where the function of nearly every word is determined by its ending and not by its location in the sentence, hyperbaton is fairly easy to pull off. In English, where the order of the words conveys the bulk of the meaning, this type of hyperbaton is more difficult. (Hyperbaton is also often called anastrophe or metaplasm; see this excellent book).

This difficulty is perhaps reflected in the definition of hyperbaton found in most English dictionaries. Those I have looked at--and I have looked at many--often define hyperbaton as merely the inversion of normal word order. No doubt that is the most common and easiest form in English. "Him I see" is hyperbaton. Unusual? Yes. But hardly as striking as what can be done in Latin and Greek. (For an extreme example in Latin, see the end of this post.)

The Land of the Lotos-Eaters, as painted by Thomas Moran.

Students tend to like learning such unusual terms--nothing impresses friends, parents, and teachers like a rare and difficult-to-pronounce word--but they nearly always miss the only thing that really matters, which is the effect the rhetorical device creates. And I can understand why they miss this. Normal Latin and Greek word order is unusual enough: how can students be expected to notice any extra distortion when to them it's all a jumble?

Tennyson, he of spine-tingling
 verse.

Well, I recently came across an excellent example of hyperbaton in English poetry that I think may help my students to understand its effect in Latin and Greek. It comes from the first stanza of Tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters":

  And like a downward smoke, the slender stream

  Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.

 When I first read that, a shiver went down my spine, one of those physical reactions that according to A. E. Housman is the mark of true poetry.  And I can't help thinking that part of my reaction was caused by Tennyson's inverting and separating "to fall" and "did seem".

Whether or not they induce shivering spines in my students, these lines may at least help them to understand the effect of hyperbaton and thereby to appreciate the art and craft of poetry.

Housman, in whose opinion poetry should make one's skin bristle
 and spine shiver.

Housman's remarks come from his 1933 lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry, worth reading in its entirety. It can most easily be found in the appendix to this work, which includes a selection of his fine poetry. For a convenient collection of Tennyson's greatest hits, grab this.

Final Note: For an example of the hyperbaton that Latin and Greek authors can achieve, I point to this passage from Sallust (Bellum Catilinae 5.9), one of my favorite authors:

Res ipsa hortari videtur, quoniam de moribus civitatis tempus admonuit, supra repetere ac paucis instituta maiorum domi militiaeque, quo modo rem publicam habuerint quantamque reliquerint, ut paulatim inmutata ex pulcherruma atque optuma pessuma ac flagitiosissuma facta sit, disserere.

Cast your eyes on instituta, the third word of the second line. It is the direct object of disserere, the very last word in the passage. I doubt that Milton or Tennyson, even at their spine-tinglingest, could pull off a hyperbaton like that.