Epimone

Epimone — Greek for 'tarrying' or 'delay' — is the rhetorical figure of returning again and again to the same phrase or point, refusing to let the audience move past it. Unlike anaphora, which repeats a phrase at the start of successive clauses within a single passage, epimone can recur across a whole speech or scene, so that the phrase becomes a drumbeat the audience begins to expect.

The figure is a device of insistence. It is used when the speaker suspects that a single utterance will be forgotten, dismissed, or reasoned around, and that only sheer return can make the point stick. Antony's repeated 'And Brutus is an honourable man' in Julius Caesar is the most famous English example: the phrase is friendly on its first appearance, ironic on its second, and devastating by its fifth.

Because the figure works by wearing the audience down, timing matters more than in most devices. Each return must add slightly new context, so that the repeated phrase acquires a new meaning at each appearance. A phrase that is merely repeated without the ground shifting beneath it becomes noise; a phrase whose ground shifts turns into an indictment.

Common mistake: repeating the phrase without changing the frame. Epimone is not chorus — the surrounding sentences must move, or the returned phrase has nothing new to strike against.