Saturday, April 16, 2022

"Butcher's Tale"

I was thinking about "Butcher's Tale" last night, specifically:
And I can't stop shaking
My hands won't stop shaking
My arms won't stop shaking
My mind won't stop shaking
I realized that there are a couple features here that illustrate the incessant nature of this shaking.

Of course, there's the repetition of the word itself and even of the structure of the lines.  Different body parts are substituted, but each line ends with the phrase "won't stop shaking" (the rhetorical term for this structure is epistrophe).

The first line is a bit different, but the other three lines are all sung to the same melody, something like:


The repetition of this melody not only contributes to the incessant feeling, but it also emphasizes the lines' similarity.