RRhetoric
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Balance & Opposition

Chiasmus

ky-AZ-mus / kaɪˈæzməs

A two-part structure where the second half reverses the order of the first: A-B, then B-A. The crossing shape makes the sentence feel complete and closed. With the exact same words reversed, it is antimetabole.

"Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country." — JFK

Don't confuse it with Antimetabole. Antimetabole reverses the *same words*; chiasmus may invert grammar or concepts without exact lexical repetition.

Drill this device — 13 excerpts

In the Reader — 13 excerpts

Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me
— Emily Dickinson, Poem · open the passage →
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet · open the passage →
'Tis better to have loved and lost
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. · open the passage →
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass · open the passage →
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass · open the passage →
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass · open the passage →
I thought it great fun when you played with me, just as they thought it great fun when I played with them.
— Henrik Ibsen, Et dukkehjem (A Doll's House) · open the passage →
I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde · open the passage →
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
— James Joyce, Dubliners · open the passage →
The sun lay on the grass and warmed it, and in the shade under the grass the insects
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath · open the passage →
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever …
— Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail · open the passage →
He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon …
— Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish · open the passage →
the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims.
— Toni Morrison, Beloved · open the passage →

Travels with

Devices that share a passage with chiasmus most often — company reveals character.

Anaphora 14 Polysyndeton 9 Antithesis 7 Metaphor 7 Synecdoche 5 Parataxis 5 Passive Voice 5 Parallelism 5

The rest of the family

Antithesis Parallelism Isocolon Antimetabole Juxtaposition Oxymoron Paradox