A Catalogue of Selected Rhetorical Devices Used in the Works of Edgar Allan Poe

CHIASMOS (sometimes spelled "chiasmus"): reversing the arrangement of subject and complement in successive clauses (AB:BA):

(The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket 3: 156)

At each intersection of these paths the nest of an albatross is constructed, and a penguin's nest in the centre of each square--thus every penguin is surrounded by four albatrosses, and each albatross by a like number of penguins.

While some rhetors make no distinction between antimetabole and chiasmos, I would insist on differentiating: in antimetabole the exact same two words are reversed in order:

("Lionizing" 2:38)

He observed that all fools were philosophers, and that all philosophers were fools.

Here we have an AB:BA reversal of precise words: fools/philosophers: philosophers/fools. In chiasmos the words reversed are not entirely the same and up to four different words or phrases can be used:

('The Murders in the Rue Morgue" 4:162)

The shrill voice was very loud-louder than the gruff one.

In chiasmos it is not the words so much as the order of the parts of speech that reverse--above: noun, adjective; adjective, (pro)noun. Still, both devices can--but do not always--function similarly to suggest ironic reversal (see instances in Thoreau's Walden, for example). Lanham suggests other functions: "Chiasmus seems to set up a natural internal dynamic that draws the parts closer together, as if the second element wanted to flip over and back over the first, condensing the assertion back toward the compression of Oxymoron and Pun. The AB:BA form seems to exhaust the possibilities of argument..." (33).

Quinn provides another distinction between antimetabole and chiasmos, suggesting that larger groups of words can constitute chiasmos: not just sentences, but entire paragraphs, even entire books, can be arranged with the first half reversed in the second half, as if each half is a mirror image of the other (95). Indeed, some scholars have seen a chiasmatic structure in several of Poe's prose works, and this certainly seems true of Pym, for instance. Nanny has detected the structure as well in "The Masque of the Red Death," Eureka, and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Kopely sees it in "The Tell-Tale Heart": "The story comprises two halves, each of them featuring nine paragraphs, with the second half reversing the order of phrase in the first. Together, the halves yield chiasmus--the pattern ABCDEEDCBA. Thus the beginning's 'You fancy me mad' ...is answered by the ending's 'If you still think me mad'.... At the close of the ninth paragraph, at the center of the symmetrical phrasing, is the central phrase of the tale, 'damned spot' ..." (235).

CHRONOGRAPHIA: a type of enargia (see below)--the description of time:

("The Masque of the Red Death" 4: 252-53)

It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause ... and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes, (which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies,) there came yet another chiming of the clock....