Jan 02 2009
When Repetition in Writing Works
You learned in school to avoid repetition in writing. But if you learned anything in school, you should have learned that you can’t believe everything you learned in school. Repetition (the previous two sentences are filled with it) can be used as a literary device. To strengthen my point, read the following stanza of a wonderful poem by William Butler Yeats entitled “When You Are Old”:
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
Yeats used the word “loved” (or “love”) no fewer than five times in those four lines. Repetitious? Sure. Could he have avoided it with words such as “adored,” “worshipped” and so on? Of course. But he chose not to. I assume he felt that “love” is a good, powerful word, and that using it repeatedly would strengthen – not weaken – his poem. I believe he was right.
There is one caveat to using repetition as a literary device: Make sure it’s a conscious, well-thought-out strategy, and not just laziness.
Another good example is the Churchill; “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender”. Useful.
Another prominent example: “I have a dream…”
Repetition is definitely a powerful technique when used deliberately.
For instance, the use of ‘She remembered’ in this passage:
“She remembered to have hated her father’s overbearing manner towards her gentle, humorous, kindly-souled mother. She remembered running over the breakwater at Sheerness and finding the boat. She remembered to have been petted and flattered by all the men when she had gone to the dockyard, for she was a delicate, rather proud child. She remembered the funny old mistress, whose assistant she had become, whom she had loved to help in the private school.”
And the writer? D. H. Lawrence in ‘Sons & Lovers’.