The Schemes Examples

Anastrophe

"Clear, placid Leman! thy contrasted lake With the wild world I dwelt in." (Lord Byron, Childe Harold)

Epistrophe

"Don't you ever talk about my friends! You don't know any of my friends. You don't look at any of my friends. And you certainly wouldn't condescend to speak to any of my friends." (Judd Nelson as John Bender in The Breakfast Club, 1865)

Assonance

"Flash with a rash gimme my cash flickin' my ash Runnin with my money, son, go out with a blast." (Busta Rhymes, "Gimme Some More")

Anaphora

"I want her to live. I want her to breathe. I want her to aerobicize." (Weird Science, 1985)

Chiasmus

"I'd rather be looked over than overlooked." - Mae West

Climax

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."-- John 1:1-2 (KJV)

Parenthesis

"In the valley of the jolly--ho-ho-ho!--Green Giant." (commercial jingle for Green Giant foods)

Apposition

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins." (Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita)

Antithesis

"Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing." (Goethe)

Epanalepsis

"Mankind must put an end to war--or war will put an end to mankind." (John F. Kennedy, speech at the United Nations, 1961)

Parallelism

"New roads; new ruts." (G. K. Chesterton)

Consonance

"Ralegh has backed the maid to a tree As Ireland is backed to England And drives inland Till all her strands are breathless." - Ocean's Love to Ireland by Seamus Heaney

Alliteration

"The soul selects her own society." (Emily Dickinson)

Ellipsis

"There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them." (Virginia Woolf)

Antimetabole

"We didn't land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth Rock landed on us." (Malcolm X)