The term "anaphora" comes from the Greek for "a carrying up or back," and refers to a type of parallelism created when successive phrases or lines begin with the same words, often resembling a list of complaints/problems. The repetition can be as simple as a single word or as long as an entire phrase. anaphora is used in much of the world’s religious and devotional poetry, including numerous Biblical Psalms. Elizabethan and Romantic poets were masters of anaphora, as evident in the writings of William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser. Shakespeare frequently used anaphora, in both his plays and poems. For example, in Sonnet No. 66, he begins ten lines with the word "and": "Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, As to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn, And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd, And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd, And strength by limping sway disabled And art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly--doctor-like--controlling skill, And simple truth miscall'd simplicity, And captive good attending captain ill: Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that, to die, I leave my love alone." Not only can anaphora create a driving rhythm by the recurrence of the same sound, it can also intensify the emotion of the poem.
Great stuff as usual Torana - anyone interested in this sort of thing is strongly recommended to check out the following link to wikipedia articles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_%28rhetorical_device%29 For all sorts of (rhetoric based) repetition inc. anaphora
