A weary lot is thine, fair maid,
A weary lot is thine!
To pull the thorn thy brow to braid,
And press the rue for wine.
A lightsome eye, a soldier's mien
A feather of the blue,
A doublet of the Lincoln green –
No more of me you knew
My Love!
No more of me you knew. (Walter Scott)
The repetition of the whole line in its full form requires interpretation. Superlinear analysis based on associations aroused by the sense of the whole poem suggests that this repetition expresses the regret of the Rover for his Love's unhappy lot. Compare also the repetition in the line of Thomas Moore's:
"Those evening bells! Those evening bells!"
Meditation, sadness, reminiscence and other psychological and emotional states of mind are suggested by the repetition of the phrase with the intensifier 'those'.
The distributional model of repetition, the aim of which is intensification, is simple: it is immediate succession of the parts repeated. Repetition may also stress monotony of action, it may suggest fatigue, or despair, or hopelessness, or doom, as in:
"What has my life been? Fag and grind, fag and grind. Turn the wheel, turn the wheel." (Dickens)
Here the rhythm of the repeated parts makes the monotony and hopelessness of the speaker's life still more keenly felt.
This function of repetition is to be observed in Thomas Hood's poem "The Song of the Shirt" where different forms of repetition are employed.
"Work – work – work!
Till the brain begins to swim!
Work – work – work
Till the eyes are heavy and dim!
Seam, and gusset, and band,
Band, and gusset and seam, –
Till over the buttons I fall asleep,
And sew them on in a dream."
Of course, the main idea, that of long and exhausting work, is expressed by lexical means: work 'till the brain begins to swim' and 'the eyes are heavy and dim', till, finally, 'I fall asleep.' But the repetition here strongly enforces this idea and, moreover, brings in additional nuances of meaning.
In grammars it is pointed out that the repetition of words connected by the conjunction and will express reiteration or frequentative action. For example:
"Fledgeby knocked and rang, and Fledgeby rang and knocked, but no one came."
There are phrases containing repetition which have become lexical units of the English language, as on and on, over and over, again and again and others. They all express repetition or continuity of the action, as in:
"He played the tune over and over again."
Sometimes this shade of meaning is backed up by meaningful words, as in:
I sat desperately, working and working.
They talked and talked all night.
The telephone rang and rang but no one answered.
The idea of continuity is expressed here not only by the repetition but also by modifiers such as 'all night'.
Background repetition, which we have already pointed out, is sometimes used to stress the ordinarily unstressed elements of the utterance. Here is a good example:
"I am attached to you. But I can't consent and won't consent and I never did consent and I never will consent to be lost in you." (Dickens)
The emphatic element in this utterance is not the repeated word 'consent' but the modal words 'can't', 'won't', 'will', and also the emphatic 'did'. Thus the repetition here loses its main function and only serves as a means by which other elements are made to stand out clearly. It is worthy of note that in this sentence very strong stress falls on the modal verbs and 'did' but not on the repeated 'consent' as is usually the case with the stylistic device.
Like many stylistic devices, repetition is polyfunctional. The functions enumerated do not cover all its varieties. One of those already mentioned, the rhythmical function, must not be under-estimated when studying the effects produced by repetition. Most of the examples given above give rhythm to the utterance. In fact, any repetition enhances the rhythmical aspect of the utterance.
There is a variety of repetition which we shall call "root-repetition", as in:
"To live again in the youth of the young." (Galsworthy)
or,
"He loves a dodge for its own sake; being... – the dodgerest of all the dodgers." (Dickens)
or,
"Schemmer, Karl Schemmer, was a brute, a brutish brute." (London)
In root-repetition it is not the same words that are repeated but the same root. Consequently we are faced with different words having different meanings (youth: young; brutish: brute), but the shades of meaning are perfectly clear.
Another variety of repetition may be called synonymical repetition. This is the repetition of the same idea by using synonymous words and phrases which by adding a slightly different nuance of meaning intensify the impact of the utterance, as in.
"...are there not capital punishments sufficient in your statutes? Is there not blood enough upon your penal code?" (Byron)
Here the meaning of the words 'capital punishments' and 'statutes' is repeated in the next sentence by the contextual synonyms 'blood' and 'penal code'.
Here is another example from Keats' sonnet "The Grasshopper and the Cricket."
"The poetry of earth is never dead...
The poetry of earth is ceasing never..."
There are two terms frequently used to show the negative attitude of the critic to all kinds of synonymical repetitions. These are pleonasm and taиtology. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines pleonasm as "the use of more words in a sentence than are necessary to express the meaning; redundancy of expression." Tautology is defined as "the repetition of the same statement; the repetition (especially in the immediate context) of the same word or phrase or of the same idea or statement in other words; usually as a fault of style."
Here are two examples generally given as illustrations:
"It was a clear starry night, and not a cloud was to be seen."
"He was the only survivor; no one else was saved."
It is not necessary to distinguish between these two terms, the distinction being very fine. Any repetition may be found faulty if it is not motivated by the aesthetic purport of the writer. On the other hand, any seemingly unnecessary repetition of words or of ideas expressed in different words may be justified by the aim of the communication.
For example, "The daylight is fading, the sun is setting, and night is coming on" as given in a textbook of English composition is regarded as tautological, whereas the same sentence may serve as an artistic example depicting the approach of night.
A certain Russian literary critic has wittily called pleonasm "stylistic elephantiasis," a disease in which the expression of the idea swells up and loses its force. Pleonasm may also be called "the art of wordy silence."
Both pleonasm and tautology may be acceptable in oratory inasmuch as they help the audience to grasp the meaning of the utterance. In this case, however, the repetition of ideas is not considered a fault although it may have no aesthetic function.
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