Why use refrains

He will refrain from planting. You must refrain from all interference. Refrain from smoking in the bedrooms. Refrain is purely a poetic device, and the most important function that a refrain may serve in poetry is to lay emphasis and create rhythm.

When a line or phrase recurs in a poem, or a piece of literature, it becomes noticeable to the readers. Common Examples of Repetition Time after time. Heart to heart. Boys will be boys. Hand in hand. Get ready; get set; go. Hour to hour. Sorry, not sorry. Over and over. Parallelism is a literary device that has parts of writing grammatically similar. This creates an emphasis on repeated ideas and can also connect ideas. In poetry, parallelism can aid in the meter, memorability, and efficient connection of ideas.

The chorus in Classical Greek drama was a group of actors who described and commented upon the main action of a play with song, dance, and recitation. Greek tragedy had its beginnings in choral performances, in which a group of 50 men danced and sang dithyrambs—lyric hymns in praise of the god Dionysus.

They function, scholars have suggested variously, to offer a sense of rich spectacle to the drama ; to provide time for scene changes and give the principle actors a break; to offer important background and summary information that facilitates an audience's ability to follow the live performance; to offer commentary Chorus effects thicken your signal by copying it multiple times, coloring the copied signals, and playing them back slightly delayed.

Here's a quick and simple definition: In a poem or song, a refrain is a line or group of lines that regularly repeat, usually at the end of a stanza in a poem or at the end of a verse in a song. In a speech or other prose writing, a refrain can refer to any phrase that repeats a number of times within the text. When a line is repeated in a poem, it's a technique called refrain. Refrain is repetition of usually a line, a phrase , two or three lines, or even words in a poem. Repetition, on the other hand, involves repetition of words, phrases, syllables, or even sounds in a full piece.

Another difference is that a refrain in a poem may appear at the end of a stanza; however, this recurrence of words and phrases in repetition may occur in any line of stanza. Villanelle , on the contrary, is a poetic form consisting of nineteen lines that uses refrain in its first and third lines.

Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. This refraining line is creating rhythm as well as emphasizing the idea. Notice that this line, though, varies slightly in the final stanza, yet is still considered to be a refrain. A song refrain doesn't always have to make sense—sometimes it can be essentially nonsense and still serve the purpose of pulling the audience in through catchy repetition.

Take Outkast's "Hey Ya," the refrain of which is simply:. Consider this part of the song in relation to the refrain which these lines immediately follow :.

You think you've got it Oh, you think you've got it But "got it" just don't get it 'Til there's nothing at all. First, it's about love—he thought he had love in his relationship, but he didn't understand that the love was false.

Second, these lines can be seen as a small joke on listeners, who are likely not to realize that the song, despite its upbeat sound, is sad. In this sense, these lines might directly refer to the song's refrain: listeners think that the chorus is just an excuse for dancing, when maybe it's meant to express the frustration and incomprehensibility of failed love.

Thus, just as Outkast doesn't get love, listeners don't get the refrain of "Hey Ya. In speeches and other prose writing, a refrain refers simply to any phrase or sentence that is regularly repeated.

Refrains are popular devices in speeches, because repetition is memorable, musical, and can help to give a common structure and meaning to disparate ideas. These qualities are particularly important in speeches, because the audience must be made to understand and remember complex ideas without the ability to "rewind" or parse a phrase for its meaning. Sojourner Truth uses refrain in her famous speech "Ain't I a Woman? Her refrain —which later became the name by which her untitled speech is known—is a rhetorical question , repeated to make the point that women are just as capable as men.

Below is an excerpt:. That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me!

I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me!

By alternating this rhetorical question with evidence of her equality to men, Sojourner Truth uses refrain in order to make her point seem obvious; each time the question is repeated, the notion of contradicting her seems more and more silly.

By the end of the paragraph—once "And ain't I a woman? And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. King uses this refrain for many reasons, but among the most important is that the repetition of "I have a dream" creates a rhythm that makes the statement begin to feel inevitable. This is powerful rhetorical momentum in a speech about progress and equality, and it seems to suggest that King's dream is destined to prevail, just as the phrase is destined to recur.

The phrase "Yes we can" has been a longtime motto of Obama's, and while it appears in many of his speeches, he used it most iconically as a refrain in his speech after winning the election. In the excerpt below, Obama repeatedly references Ann Nixon Cooper, a year old black woman from Atlanta who couldn't vote when she was younger because of her gender and race:. And tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America—the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

At a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can. When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs, a new sense of common purpose. When the bombs fell on our harbour and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved.

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that 'We Shall Overcome'. Obama's refrain serves many purposes: it makes a rhetorical point, it uplifts the audience, and it unifies historical events into a narrative of progress. Perhaps most important, though, the refrain makes the audience feel that they are a part of Obama's victory.

As you watch the video of the speech here , notice that the repetition of "Yes we can" invites the audience to participate by repeating the line after he does. Obama never explicitly tells the audience that they may do this—it's the very structure of the refrain that stirs the audience into participation, which speaks to the rhetorical power of the refrain.

The refrain is a versatile literary device that takes many forms and has many purposes. Writers, musicians, and orators use refrains in songs, speeches, and poems in order to drive a point home, aid a reader or listener's memory, establish central themes, and create structure.

Repeated words or phrases stick more easily in a reader or listener's mind and accentuate the structure and rhythm of what's being said—a repeated line like "I have a dream," for example, establishes the central theme of change and progress, and creates a rhythm within which progress feels as inevitable as the speech's structure.

Sometimes refrains are used simply to condense and repeat the central subject of a poem or song, as in Henley's "Ballade of Midsummer Days and Nights" and Ja Rule's "Always on Time," both excerpted above. Refrains can also organize the content of a speech, song, or poem by providing a memorable rhetorical framework. This is particularly useful in poems or songs that move quickly and wildly between divergent images and ideas, as in Ginsberg's poem "Howl.

Refrain Definition. Refrain Examples. Refrain Function. Refrain Resources. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does.