Homoioptoton (ho-mee-op-to’-ton): The repetition of similar case endings in adjacent words or in words in parallel position.
Note: Since this figure only works with inflected languages, it has often been conflated with homoioteleuton and (at least in English) has sometimes become equivalent to simple rhyme: “To no avail, I ate a snail.”
“To mime is to climb. Like a bug on a wall starting to fall and quickly swatted leaving a stain, signifying death’s infallibility like a mind-freezing tale pouring from a poetic pail to further muddy the earth’s already profane surface.”
This passage is from “Linda Lou” written by the famous poet Gosh Bissle. It was written solely for his 8-year-old son Alfonso to decorate his birthday cake in Helvetica font. It was baby-blue and bold. Gosh stuck his finger in the cake and licked it as he struck the match to light the cake’s candles. Given that he was trying to lick his finger and light a match at the same time, the lit match fell from his grip and lit his shirtsleeve on fire. Luckily there was a bowl of Fizzy Clementine punch on the table. He stuck his arm in the punch and effectively extinguished the flames, ruining Alfonso’s birthday celebration, but saving himself.
For what he had done, his wife Susannah stuck his head in the punch bowl, hoping she might drown him. But she realized he made pretty good money with his poetry and relented. Gosh choked and sputtered and ran out of the dining room door, to his study. “I am inspired” he said quietly to himself as he sat down and picked up his pen, and flattened a piece of parchment he was about to write on. He squirmed around in his chair, kept looking at the ceiling and out the window at the washing blowing on the clothesline. His mind was blank, like the parchment in front of him.
Then, a bolt of light shot through his brain. “I’m having a stroke!” he exclaimed and fell to the floor, writhing and foaming at the mouth. His family gathered around him, knowing there was nothing they could do. Suddenly, his eyes opened wide, and he asked “What’s going on?” Susannah told him he had been dying of a stroke. He said, “Not any more. Now please take your leave. I’ve got work to do.” Alfonso and Susannah left him alone.
He wrote: “Love is a Titan wearing hand-made pants, carefully stitched and nicely draped and hung in a cedar-lined closet in my chamber. Suddenly my left arm is fraught with unforgiving pain. Full of sorrow, I will die now of a heart attack.”
Gosh Bissle was dead. Although he wrote only 12 known poems, they all received critical acclaim. The hand-written manuscripts were worth millions, so Susannah and Alfonso are well taken care of. It is rumored that there is a bound volume of additional poems of Gosh’s somewhere.
Some medical experts have concluded it was Gosh’s lifestyle that killed him before his time. He refused to eat vegetables and ate a bucket of whipped cream before bed every night. Just now, science is showing us a connection between a healthy diet and longevity.
I will leave you with one last twinkling example plucked from the darkened sky of Bissle’s galloping genius:
White Room
The wet and balmy wind I pushed forth through the rearward seams of my fine satin pants was like a Jamacian ceiling fan parsing the air with it mahogany blades—ancient, dearly bought at Manilla’s lumbermart, leaving behind massive stumps where the Manananggal dance to draw in men to to tear apart and eat.
The sun rises like a balloon full of urine collected from sheep in quarantine at the train station, where I await my conveyance to Edinburgh. I nervously rub against other passengers on the platform, moving my hips rapidly and thinking of you.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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