The figures of rhetoric were a series of formulas devised by the Ancient Greeks for writing beautiful, memorable lines. They weren’t plucked out of nothing, of course. They started out by looking at lines that were already famous and seeing what they had in common. So you take:
Bond, James Bond.
And you wonder to yourself why it’s such a famous line. It is, after all, just a chap’s name. It doesn’t actually say anything more than “My name is Mr James Bond”. It just says it better. Why?
Well, then you take:
To be or not to be
And you wonder why Shakespeare didn’t say “Whether or not to be”. Would have said the same thing. And then you take:
O captain! My captain!
Crisis? What crisis?
Zed’s dead, baby, Zed’s dead.
Yeah, baby, yeah!
Events, dear boy. Events.
Fly, my pretties! Fly!
And you start to see a pattern. In fact, you can’t believe that you never noticed the pattern before. But that’s only because the phrases were never stacked up next to each other like that. The Ancient Greeks noticed that pattern: this-that-this. They called it diacope.
Unfortunately, the figures of rhetoric don’t get taught in schools any more. They used to be. Shakespeare would have had to learn them all by heart. But now, they’re largely unknown. …. which is a shame.