Definition and Examples of Hypallage

A figure of speech in which an adjective or participle (an epithet) grammatically qualifies a noun other than the person or thing it is actually describing is called hypallage. Hypallage is sometimes defined more broadly as the inversion or radical rearrangement of normal word order, an extreme type of anastrophe or hyperbaton. Examples and Observations: I lighted a thoughtful cigarette and, dismissing Archimedes for the nonce, allowed my mind to dwell once more on the ghastly jam into which I had been thrust by young Stiffys ill-advised behaviour.(P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters, 1938)Winter kept us warm, coveringEarth in forgetful snow, feedingA little life with dried tubers.(T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land)anyone lived in a pretty how town(with up so floating many bells down)(E.E. Cummings, anyone lived in a pretty how town)There one goes, unsullied as yet, in his Pullman pride, toying--oh, boy!--with a blunderbuss bourbon, being smoked by a large cigar, riding out to the wide open spaces of the faces of his waiting audience.(Dylan Thomas, A Visit to America. Quite Early One Morning, 1968)[I]n short, tis of such a nature, as my father once told my Uncle Toby, upon the close of a long dissertation upon the subject: You can scarce, said he, combine two ideas together upon it, brother Toby, without an hypallage.--Whats that? crie d my uncle Toby.The cart before the horse, replied my father.(Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, 1759-1767)Like enallage, hypallage is an apparent mistake. All changes of grammatical function are not valid cases of hypallage. Puttenham, who calls hypallage the changeling, points out that the user of this figure perverts meaning by shifting the application of words: . . . as he should say for . . . come dine with me and stay not, come stay with and me and dine not.The mistake becomes a figure by expressing a meaning, albeit an unexpected one. According to Guiraud (p. 197), The device is related to the aesthetics of vagueness; by suppressing the relationship of necessity between determined and determinant, it tends to liberate the latter.(Bernard Marie Dupriez and Albert W. Halsall, A Dictionary of Literary Devices. Univ. of Toronto Press, 1991) Shakespeares Use of Hypallage His coward lips did from their color fly.(Cassius in William Shakespeares Julius Caesar, Act 1, sc. 2)The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, mans hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.(Bottom in William Shakespeares A Midsummer Nights Dream, Act 4, sc. 1)The rhetorical figure Shakespeare uses here is hypallage, often described as the transferred epithet. His rudeness so with his authorized youth did livery falseness in a pride of truth. It is the rudeness that is authorized, not the youth; hypallage transfers the modifier (authorized) from object (rudeness) to subject (youth).(Lisa Freinkel, Reading Shakespeares Will. Columbia Univ. Press, 2002)