Chiasmus (redirected from Chiastic)

Chiasmus 

a type of antithetical parallelism in which the parts of two parallel elements are placed in reverse sequence, in the pattern ab = b¹a¹. An example is “It was not a grass-blade in the open field that was nodding,/Nodding was my poor little homeless head.” Sometimes the sense of parallelism is maintained by the repeating of intermediate words in the pattern abc = c¹ba¹, as in Pushkin’s lines Avtomedony nashi boiki,/Neutomimy nashi troiki (“Lively our Automedons,/Our troikas tireless”).