chiasmus
 ki-az'-mus Gk. "a diagonal arrangement"

  1. Repetition of ideas in inverted order
  2. Repetition of grammatical structures in inverted order (not to be mistaken with antimetabole, in which identical words are repeated and inverted).
 
Examples
 

But O, what damned minutes tells he o'er
Who dotes, yet doubts; suspects, yet strong loves.
—Shakespeare, Othello 3.3

The idea of affection occurs in "dotes" and "strongly loves"; the idea of doubting in "doubts" and "suspects". These two ideas occur in the quotation in an A B B A order, thus repeated and inverted

It is boring to eat; to sleep is fulfilling

The pattern is present participle-infinitive; infinitive-present participle

Related Figures
 

 
  Sources:


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Gideon O. Burton, Brigham Young University
Please cite "Silva Rhetoricae" (rhetoric.byu.edu)

Trees | SILVA RHETORICAE | Flowers