Hyperbaton is the rhetorical device of delivering Words in an unnatural order - usually to stress the Word in the unexpected position in some way.
Hyperbaton is commonplace and effective in heavily inflected langauges where Word-order is fluid (eg in Attic Greek, Latin and Sanskrit), but rarer and feebler in analytic languages (English, Chinese) which have less freedom to adjust Word-sequence.
Some wan examples of hyperbaton in English literature include:
And gone are all my Summer days (William Soutar) [All my summer days are gone]
Uneasy lies the head which wears a crown (Shakespeare: Henry IV.ii) [The head which wears a crown lies uneasily].
There are much clearer examples of hyperbaton in fully inflected languages, including this humdinger from Horace' Odes.1.v:
Quis multa gracilis te puer in Rosa
perfusus liquidis urget odoribus
grato, Pyrrha, sub antro?
[Pyrrha, quis gracilis puer perfusus liquidis odororibus te urget in multa Rosa sub grato antro?]
Copyright © 2026 eLLeNow.com All Rights Reserved.