Rock and roll rhetoric: Year of the Cat

“She comes out of the sun in a silk dress
Running like a watercolor in the rain.”

How beautifully cinematic, especially following the opening lines:

“On a morning from a Bogart movie
In a country where they turn back time
You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre
Contemplating a crime.”

The girl is running, her dress is running, so I think this is an example of syllepsis; where a single word works in two different ways.

Alanis Morissette used this strikingly in Head Over Feet:

“You held your breathe, and the door for me.”

And, courtesy of Mark Forsyth, I find that Charles Dickens used it brilliantly:

“Miss Bolo rose from the table considerably agitated, and went straight home, in a flood of tears, and a sedan chair.” (The Pickwick Papers)

But back to the enormously talented Al Stewart. Here here is on the Old Grey Whistle Test:

Year of the Cat was the closing track on the 1976 album of the same name.