Poets often change the order of words for emphasis, I suppose, and to make a line scan better. But is there a name for this device?
e.g. From Robert Herrick:
Minds that are great and free
Should not on fortune pause;
“Shit”?
Inversion. Or “Inverted syntax.”
Emglis customarily uses the order subject-verb-object in prose; inversions are common in poetry either for stress or meter. In other languages, such as German and Latin, a non-copulative verb (i.e., in most cases anything but “to be”) will appear at the end after the object.
English syntax allows for a great deal of flexibility, to provide appropriate stress to a key point. Passive voice is one of the most obvious such uses: when you’re interested in whether the work got done, not necessarily by whom it was done, something like “The check was mailed on Monday, by our office manager from the main post office, which he drives by on his way home from work” becomes effective. The key point is that the check was in fact mailed; the supplemental data of who mailed it and when are supportive of the main thrust, that the check has in fact been mailed.
Inversions also work well to switch stress. “War and Peace, Tolstoy wrote in the 1800s” is quite clear, despite the reversal to put the focus on the direct object. The clear purport of the sentence is to focus on the novel, not on its author, as “Tolstoy wrote War and Peace…” would.
In verse, an even greater degree of freedom in syntactic arrangement is allowed, to conform to the constraints of meter:
The predicate, we normally
End sentences with it;
To switch around syntactically
Would make it read like shit.
10Q
Hyperbaton, if it is for emphasis
Hoo-Ha!
I was going to try to be witty, but this beat me seven ways to Sunday!
hh