 Anaphora is the repetition of words or phrases in a group of sentences or clauses or poetic lines. It's sort of like epistrophe, which I discussed in a previous video, except that the repetition in Anaphora occurs at the beginning of these structures, while the repetition in epistrophe occurs at the end. Like epistrophe, Anaphora has ancient origins, combining the Greek words Anna, meaning repeat, or back, and Pharene, meaning to carry. As this origin suggests, when we hear or read Anaphoras, the sound and meaning of certain words are carried back to us again and again, until we begin to carry them with us as well. In other words, like so many other forms of literary repetition, epistrophe, rhyme, meter, and so on, Anaphoras are incredibly powerful mnemonic devices. When I remember Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, or Winston Churchill's We Shall Fight Them on the Beach of Speech, I'm remembering the Anaphoras. In a variety of ways, these speeches call to mind earlier moments in human history, in which oral forms of communication were much more prominent than written forms. Two of the oldest documents from this history are the Old Testament and the New Testament of the Bible, and both works are chock-full of Anaphoras, Thou shalt not, blessed are thee, given to the Lord, and so on. These repetitive phrases ensured that the lessons they conveyed were carried on by their listeners millennia after they were created. Poets often use this device to a similar effect. John Keats uses Anaphora throughout his famous poem Ode on a Grecian Urn to convey a sense of the immortality of the visual art that the poem describes, and Langston Hughes uses the device in a similar manner in many of his poems, including The Negro Speaks of Rivers. Given our current historical moment, however, I want to dwell for a minute on a very recent poem, Lynn Unger's Pandemic, which was written just two months ago during the early days of the current COVID-19 lockdown. Here's how it goes. What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath, the most sacred of times, cease from travel, cease from buying and selling, give up just for now on trying to make the world different than it is, sing, pray, touch only those to whom you commit your life, center down. And when your body has become still, reach out with your heart. Know that we are connected in ways that are terrifying and beautiful. You could hardly deny it now. Know that our lives are in one another's hands. Surely that has come clear. Do not reach out your hands, reach out your heart, reach out your words, reach out all the tendrils of compassion that move invisibly where we cannot touch. Promise this world your love for better or for worse in sickness and in health so long as we all shall live. Lynn Unger is a minister as well as a poet, and this profession certainly colors the themes of the poem. But it also influences the poem's anaphoric style as the speaker moves from instructions on what not to do, cease from travel, cease from buying and selling, to instructions on what to do, reach out your heart, reach out your words, reach out all the tendrils of compassion. The two opposing actions in the poem, contraction and expansion, are emphasized by the contrasting anaphoras, which in the first stanza tell us what we're giving up, and in the second stanza show us how we can still give comfort while we continue to social distance. I can't say whether the poem will live on past the current quarantine, but I know that I carry it with me now, in large part because of the anaphoras that structure its message. Stay healthy everybody.