Hypallage is a literary device that is the reversal of the syntactic relation of two words (as in "her beauty's face").

One kind of hypallage, also known as a transferred epithet, is the trope or rhetorical device in which a modifier, usually an adjective, is applied to the "wrong" word in the sentence. The word whose modifier is thus displaced can either be actually present in the sentence, or it can be implied logically. The effect often stresses the emotions or feelings of the individual by expanding them on to the environment. For example:

• "On the idle hill of summer/Sleepy with the flow of streams/Far I hear..." (A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad
  A Shropshire Lad
  A Shropshire Lad is a cycle of sixty-three poems by the English poet Alfred Edward Housman . Some of the better-known poems in the book are "To an Athlete Dying Young", "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now" and "When I Was One-and-Twenty".The collection was published in 1896...
  
  ) — idle hill... sleepy is a hypallage: it is the narrator, not the hill, who exhibits these features.
• "The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, / And leaves the world to darkness and to me" (Thomas Gray
  Thomas Gray
  Thomas Gray was a poet, letter-writer, classical scholar and professor at Cambridge University.-Early life and education:...
  
  , "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
  Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
  Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is a poem by Thomas Gray, completed in 1750 and first published in 1751. The poem’s origins are unknown, but it was partly inspired by Gray’s thoughts following the death of the poet Richard West in 1742. Originally titled Stanza's Wrote in a Country...
  
  ") — Weary way is a hypallage: it is the ploughman, not the way, that is weary.
• "Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time" — Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum est
• "restless night" — The night was not restless, but the person who was awake through it was.
• "happy morning" — Mornings have no feelings, but the people who are awake through them do.

Hypallage is often used strikingly in Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...

 and Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 poetry. We find such examples of transferred epithets as "the winged sound of whirling" , meaning "the sound of whirling wings" (Aristophanes

Aristophanes

Aristophanes , son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus, was a comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete...

, Birds

The Birds (play)

The Birds is a comedy by the Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes. It was performed in 414 BCE at the City Dionysia where it won second prize. It has been acclaimed by modern critics as a perfectly realized fantasy remarkable for its mimicry of birds and for the gaiety of its songs...

1198), and Horace

Horace

Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...

's "angry crowns of kings" (iratos...regum apices, Odes 3.21.19f.). Virgil

Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...

 was given to hypallage beyond the transferred epithet, as "give the winds to the fleets" (dare classibus Austros, Aeneid

Aeneid

The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It is composed of roughly 10,000 lines in dactylic hexameter...

3.61), meaning "give the fleets to the winds."