… a wise saying, poem, or excerpt included before or near another text, designed
to focus the reader on a concept or concepts explored in a section of literature.
a figure of speech in which an opposition or contrast of ideas is
expressed by parallelism of words that are the opposites of, or
strongly contrasted with, each other, such as “hatred stirs up strife,
but love covers all sins”
A work's thematic topic is what readers "think the work
is about" and its THEME is a statement of "what the
work says about the subject"