W. H. Auden's lyric: I'll love you, dear, I'll love you / Till China and Africa meet / And the river jumps over the mountain / And the salmon sing in the street. // I'll love you till the ocean / Is folded and hung up to dry / And the seven stars go squawking / Like geese about the sky. // The years shall run like rabbits, / For in my arms I hold / The flower of the ages, / And the first love of the world.1
The beloved is being promised love that will last until a series of impossibilities. China and Africa meeting (continents don't move on human timescale). Rivers jumping over mountains (rivers run down, not up). Salmon singing in the street (salmon don't sing; streets don't have salmon).
This is adynaton — the rhetorical figure of expressing duration or intensity through listing impossibles. The English equivalent is until hell freezes over. The form says forever by enumerating things that will never happen.
Forsyth identifies the technique in the Auden poem and elsewhere: but that uses a thing called adynaton, which is basically until hell freezes over. It's listing impossible things.1
The technique exploits a cognitive mechanism the direct version (I will love you forever) cannot reach. I will love you forever is a claim the listener evaluates as plausible or implausible. The listener can disagree. The listener can think that's what they all say.
Until China and Africa meet and salmon sing in the street is not a claim the listener evaluates the same way. The listener registers the impossibilities, registers the form (until X impossible thing), and infers the intended meaning (forever) at a structural rather than literal level. The structural inference bypasses the listener's plausibility-evaluation. The listener does not consciously think is this true? — the listener consciously processes the impossible images and only secondarily infers the duration claim.
This is the same mechanism that produces felt-truth in chiasmus and felt-inevitability in anadiplosis: the structural form delivers the claim more powerfully than direct statement.
Adynaton has a second advantage over direct duration-statement: the impossibles are usually vivid images. Until China and Africa meet is a globe-scale image. And the salmon sing in the street is a domestic-scale image that produces an absurd-sweet visual. The listener gets memorable images alongside the duration claim.
I will love you forever delivers no images. The listener forgets it the next morning. I'll love you till the ocean is folded and hung up to dry delivers a striking image (ocean as cloth on a clothesline) that the listener can recall. The image-anchor durability is part of the technique's effect.
The technique can degenerate when the impossibles are stale. Until hell freezes over is so common it has lost its impossible-image vividness — it operates as a fixed phrase rather than as adynaton. Until pigs fly has the same problem. The form requires the impossibles to be fresh enough that the listener actually processes them as impossibilities rather than reading the formula and ignoring the content.
Auden's adynatons (China and Africa meeting; salmon singing in the street; ocean folded and hung up to dry) work because they are not standard idioms. The listener has to imagine each one. The imagination-work is part of the technique's force.
Adynaton and anaphora both use enumeration but for different ends. Anaphora accumulates instances of one thing under a repeated phrase; adynaton accumulates impossibilities that imply a single duration-claim. The structural difference: anaphora's repetitions are different; adynaton's items are similar (all impossible).
Adynaton converges with Ānandavardhana's dhvani principle on the principle that suggested-meaning lands harder than direct-meaning. The Sanskrit theory treats suggestion (vyañjanā) as the highest mode of poetic language; adynaton is a specific Greek-tradition instance of the suggestion-as-superior-mode principle. Both refuse the direct statement of what the form is trying to convey.
Adynaton maps onto two adjacent domains where the same impossibles-as-indirect-claim principle appears: creative-practice (the Sanskrit utprekṣā tradition of fanciful comparison) and behavioral-mechanics (the advertising tradition of hyperbolic-impossibility-claims for emotional intensity).
Creative-Practice (Sanskrit): The Four Alaṃkāras — Figures of Speech (Nāṭyaśāstra) — Sanskrit poetic theory catalogs utprekṣā (poetic fancy; comparison-via-imagined-impossible) as one of the named figures. The poet asserts that the lover's face is so beautiful that even the moon hides in shame — a literal impossibility used to convey intensity. The structural identity to adynaton: both traditions deploy literal-impossibility as the indirect carrier of emotional or evaluative claim. The insight neither domain generates alone: cross-tradition cataloguing reveals that impossibility-as-indirect-claim is a category-level technique humans have rediscovered independently. The synthesized adynaton+utprekṣā taxonomy provides writers with a richer toolkit than either tradition alone.
Behavioral-Mechanics: Hyperbole as Emotional Amplifier in Advertising — advertising routinely deploys hyperbolic impossibility-claims to convey product-intensity. Sleep so deep you'll never want to wake up. So good you'll forget you're hungry. Cleans so well your floors will sparkle. The hyperbole is literally false but operationally not-evaluated-as-truth-claim by the listener. The structural identity to adynaton: both crafts use intentionally-implausible claims as carriers of intensity-of-feeling that direct claims could not carry. The insight neither domain generates alone: adynaton is the literary register of a technique advertising uses constantly without naming. The crossover reveals that hyperbolic-impossibility is doing real cognitive work — bypassing literal-evaluation to deliver felt-claim — and writers can deploy it more deliberately by understanding this.
A third connection worth marking: adynaton has structural similarity to diacope — both operate via cognitive shortcuts that the listener does not consciously interrogate.
The Sharpest Implication
If adynaton delivers duration-or-intensity claims more durably than direct statement, then the entire genre of love-poetry, devotional poetry, and any other prose register that needs to convey forever or immeasurably should default to adynaton when possible. The uncomfortable implication: writers who default to direct duration-claims (I will love you forever; this is the best you've ever had; you matter immensely) are using language that does not deliver the felt-meaning they intend. The form-shift to adynaton is small and immediately portable, and the durability difference is large.
Generative Questions