Hypallage
Figures of speechTransferring an adjective to a word near the one it logically qualifies: a lonely man becomes a "lonely house."
Example
"He smoked a thoughtful cigarette."
Hypallage attributes to one word what logically belongs to another nearby: Virgil's "they went, dark, under the lonely night" — the night makes them lonely; they are the solitary ones. The displacement is no error: it contaminates the setting with the character's state, or vice versa.
It's one of the subtlest figures in the repertoire, nearly invisible on first reading — and that's its strength: emotion diffuses through the sentence without being assigned. Impressionist prose uses it constantly ("a melancholy street," "a convalescent morning"). A successful hypallage gives the outer world the temperature of the inner one.
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