Dark was the night, silent the town

• A. Anastrophe
• B. Inversion
• C. Parallelism
• D. Anaphora

Answer: (A)

Anastrophe shows up when a writer reverses the usual order of words for emphasis. In this line, the natural English order would be “The night was dark, the town was silent,” but the words are inverted to “Dark was the night, silent the town.” This deliberate rearrangement heightens the mood by foregrounding darkness and silence, a classic use of the device. While inversion is the broader term for reversing word order, the most precise label here is anastrophe because it specifically involves swapping the typical placement of adjectives and nouns to create a striking, poetic effect. The other options don’t capture that exact technique: parallelism would rely on repeating similar structures, which isn’t the case, and anaphora would involve repeating a word at the start of successive clauses, which also isn’t happening.