Definition:
A rhetorical term for a succession of clauses or sentences of approximately equal length and corresponding structure.
An isocolon with three parallel members is known as a tricolon. A four-part isocolon is a tetracolon climax.
See also:
Etymology:
From the Greek, "of equal members or clauses"Examples and Observations:
- "It takes a licking, but it keeps on ticking!"
(advertising slogan of Timex watches) - "I'm a Pepper, he's a Pepper, she's a Pepper, we're a Pepper--
Wouldn't you like to be a Pepper, too? Dr. Pepper!"
(advertising jingle for Dr. Pepper soft drink) - "Come then: let us to the task, to the battle, to the toil--each to our part, each to our station. Fill the armies, rule the air, pour out the munitions, strangle the U-boats, sweep the mines, plow the land, build the ships, guard the streets, succor the wounded, uplift the downcast, and honor the brave."
(Winston Churchill, speech given in Manchester, England, on Jan. 29, 1940) - "Nothing that's beautiful hides its face. Nothing that's honest hides its name."
(Orual in Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by C.S. Lewis. Geoffrey Bles. 1956) - "Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause."
(James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) - "An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered."
(Gilbert Keith Chesterton) - "Isocolon is a sequence of sentences of equal length, as in Pope's 'Equal your merits! equal is your din!' (Dunciad II, 244), where each sentence is assigned five syllables, iconizing the concept of equal distribution. . . .
"Parison, also called membrum, is a sequence of clauses or phrases of equal length."
(Earl R. Anderson, A Grammar of Iconism. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1998) - "The Tudor rhetoricians do not make the distinction between isocolon and parison. . . . The definitions of parison by Puttenham and Day make it identical with isocolon. The figure was in great favor among the Elizabethans as is seen from its schematic use not only in Euphues, but in the work of Lyly's imitators."
(Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language. Columbia Univ. Press, 1947)
Also Known As: parison
