From grey but leafy walls, where Ruin greenly dwells. (Byron)

Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and his sole mourner. (Dickens)

Suspense -is a compositional device which consists in arranging the matter of a communication in such a way that the less important, descriptive, subordinate parts are amassed at the beginning, the main idea being withheld till the end of the sentence:

Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle... Know ye the land of the cedar and vine...

‘Tis the clime of the East-‘tis the land of the Sun (Byron).

“Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw.” (Charles Lamb)

Sentences of this type are called periodic sentences, or periods.

Climax -is an arrangement of sentences (or of the homogeneous parts of one sentence) which secures a gradual increase in significance, importance, or emotional tension in the utterance.:

They looked at hundred of houses, they climbed thousands of stairs, they inspected innumerable kitchens. (Maugham).

Logical climax:

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, ‘My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?’ No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no chil­dren asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and-such a place, of Scrooge, Even the blind men’s dogs appeared to know him, and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails, as though they said, ‘No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!’ (Dickens “Christmas Carol”).

Emotional climax:

He was pleased when the child began to adventure across floors on hand and knees; he was gratified, when she managed the trick of balancing herself on two legs; he was delighted when she first said ‘ta-ta’; and he was rejoiced when she recognized him and smiled at him.” (Alan Paton).

Quantitative climax:

They looked at hundreds of houses; they climbed thousands of stairs; they inspected innumerable kitchens. (Maugham).

The indispensable constituents of climax:

a) the distributional constituent: close proximity of the component parts arranged in increasing order of importance or significance;

b) the syntactical pattern: parallel construct ions with possible lexical repetition;

c) the connotative constituent: the explanatory context which helps ‘the reader to grasp the gradation, as no...ever once in all his life, nobody ever, nobody, No beggars (Dickens); deep and wide, horrid, dark and tall (Byron); veritable (gem of a city).

Anticlimax - the ideas expressed may be arranged in ascending order of significance, or they may be poetical or elevated, but the final one, which the reader expects to be the culminating one, as in climax, is trifling or farcical. There is a sudden drop from the lofty or serious to the ridiculous:

In days of yore, a mighty rumbling was heard in a Mountain. It was said to be in labour, and multitudes flocked together, from far and near, to see what it would produce. After long expectation and many wise conjectures from the by-standers - out popped, a Mouse ( Aesop’s fable “The Mountain in Labour.”).

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