will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”
It is a tremendous rhetorical achievement, a sentence for the ages, but again you can learn how to imitate it, if not to match it. Pick any topic, even a trivial one, say, getting up in the morning in the face of all the reasons not to: “When you’ve stayed up all night watching Rocky for the twentieth time, when the temperature is below freezing and you’re warm underneath the blanket, when the day promises only drudgery and humiliation, when the conclusion that your life has been for naught and no one will miss you seems self-evident, when everyone you have ever cared for is either dead or angry with you, when the only pleasure you can anticipate is a cup of coffee you can barely afford, when the thought of one more day doing something you absolutely hate is unbearable, then you remind yourself of what Scarlett O’Hara said: ‘Tomorrow is another day.’ ” The sentence is bathetic, even pathetic, but its form is the same as the form of King’s sentence, and if you learn how to master the form, you can employ it “naturally” when you have something important to say.
King’s sentence has affinities with what is known in the history of style as the Ciceronian period, a “long stately sentence which suspends the verb until the end . . . with chains of subordinate clauses and balanced antitheses” ( John R. Holmes, Encyclopedia of the Essay , 1997). Michael Sheehan offers as an example these lines from Hamlet . The speaker is Claudius, the brother of the hero’s murdered father: “Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen / Th’imperial jointress to this warlike state, / Have we, as ’twere with a defeated joy, / . . . With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage, / In equal scale weighing delight and dole, / Taken to wife” (Wordmall: A Blog About the English Language, 2006). Or, in short, I’ve married my brother’s widow shortly after his death. By delaying the verb, Claudius is able to provide his own analysis of the action he takes before he names it. He confronts the stigma against marrying one’s sister-in-law (see Leviticus 20:21) directly: once our sister, now our queen; he reminds his hearers that because she is his queen, she is theirs and a partner to his military power; he acknowledges the doubleness and dubiousness of the act with a series of paradoxical antitheses: defeated joy, mirth in funeral, dirge in marriage, delight and dole; he claims to have carefully considered what he is going to do (“In equal scale weighing”), and then, after all this buildup, he springs the simple, but not all that simple, fact of what he has already done: “Taken to wife.”
One scholar explains that the characteristic effects of this style were achieved by advance planning: “one knew from the outset of a period where it was going and how it was going to get there” ( Jonas Barish, Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy , 1960). This describes the achievement from the perspective of the writer. The reader, however, doesn’t know where the writer is going; he knows only that the person taking him there is in control. Control is what this style at once performs and announces, and no one does it better than John Milton. At a moment in his pamphlet An Apology Against a Pamphlet (1642), Milton rejects the praise of his writing style offered by an adversary and pushes away artfulness in a sentence that could hardly be more artful:
For me, readers, although I cannot say that I am utterly untrained in those rules which best rhetoricians have given, or unacquainted with those examples which the prime authors of eloquence have written in any learned tongue, yet true eloquence I find to be none but the serious and hearty love of truth, and that whose mind so ever is fully possessed with a fervent desire to know good things and with the dearest charity to infuse the knowledge of them into others, when such a man would speak, his words (by
It is a tremendous rhetorical achievement, a sentence for the ages, but again you can learn how to imitate it, if not to match it. Pick any topic, even a trivial one, say, getting up in the morning in the face of all the reasons not to: “When you’ve stayed up all night watching Rocky for the twentieth time, when the temperature is below freezing and you’re warm underneath the blanket, when the day promises only drudgery and humiliation, when the conclusion that your life has been for naught and no one will miss you seems self-evident, when everyone you have ever cared for is either dead or angry with you, when the only pleasure you can anticipate is a cup of coffee you can barely afford, when the thought of one more day doing something you absolutely hate is unbearable, then you remind yourself of what Scarlett O’Hara said: ‘Tomorrow is another day.’ ” The sentence is bathetic, even pathetic, but its form is the same as the form of King’s sentence, and if you learn how to master the form, you can employ it “naturally” when you have something important to say.
King’s sentence has affinities with what is known in the history of style as the Ciceronian period, a “long stately sentence which suspends the verb until the end . . . with chains of subordinate clauses and balanced antitheses” ( John R. Holmes, Encyclopedia of the Essay , 1997). Michael Sheehan offers as an example these lines from Hamlet . The speaker is Claudius, the brother of the hero’s murdered father: “Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen / Th’imperial jointress to this warlike state, / Have we, as ’twere with a defeated joy, / . . . With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage, / In equal scale weighing delight and dole, / Taken to wife” (Wordmall: A Blog About the English Language, 2006). Or, in short, I’ve married my brother’s widow shortly after his death. By delaying the verb, Claudius is able to provide his own analysis of the action he takes before he names it. He confronts the stigma against marrying one’s sister-in-law (see Leviticus 20:21) directly: once our sister, now our queen; he reminds his hearers that because she is his queen, she is theirs and a partner to his military power; he acknowledges the doubleness and dubiousness of the act with a series of paradoxical antitheses: defeated joy, mirth in funeral, dirge in marriage, delight and dole; he claims to have carefully considered what he is going to do (“In equal scale weighing”), and then, after all this buildup, he springs the simple, but not all that simple, fact of what he has already done: “Taken to wife.”
One scholar explains that the characteristic effects of this style were achieved by advance planning: “one knew from the outset of a period where it was going and how it was going to get there” ( Jonas Barish, Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy , 1960). This describes the achievement from the perspective of the writer. The reader, however, doesn’t know where the writer is going; he knows only that the person taking him there is in control. Control is what this style at once performs and announces, and no one does it better than John Milton. At a moment in his pamphlet An Apology Against a Pamphlet (1642), Milton rejects the praise of his writing style offered by an adversary and pushes away artfulness in a sentence that could hardly be more artful:
For me, readers, although I cannot say that I am utterly untrained in those rules which best rhetoricians have given, or unacquainted with those examples which the prime authors of eloquence have written in any learned tongue, yet true eloquence I find to be none but the serious and hearty love of truth, and that whose mind so ever is fully possessed with a fervent desire to know good things and with the dearest charity to infuse the knowledge of them into others, when such a man would speak, his words (by
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