inversion, in literary style and rhetoric, the syntactic reversal of the normal order of the words and phrases in a sentence, as, in English, the placing of an adjective after the noun it modifies (“the form divine”), a verb before its subject (“Came the dawn”), or a noun preceding its preposition (“worlds between”). Inversion is most commonly used in poetry in which it may both satisfy the demands of the metre and achieve emphasis:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Inversion used simply for the sake of maintaining a rhyme scheme is considered a literary defect, although it is a common convention in folk ballads:
Then up spoke the captain of our gallant ship,
And a well-spoken man was he;
“I have married a wife in Salem town,
And tonight she a widow will be”