"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations

"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti


[Note - If any article requires updating or correction please notate this in the comment section. Thank you. - res]


Showing posts with label Palindromic Phrases. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Palindromic Phrases. Show all posts

Sunday, August 17, 2025

Palindromic Words, Phrases & Poems



Palindromic  Words, Phrases & Poems

Compiled by R.E. Slater


What Is a Palindrome?

A palindrome is a word, phrase, number, or other sequence of characters that reads the same backward as forward. Examples include "madam", "racecar", and "12321".

Words:
Many single words are palindromes, such as "rotor", "level", "stats", and "civic".
[go here for an extensive list of palindromic words from 2 to 12 letters... also, names and phrases!]

Phrases
:
Palindromic phrases are also common, often involving ignoring spaces and punctuation, like "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama". Or, "Do geese see God?" [go here for more...and here...]

Numbers
:
Numerical palindromes exist, like 121, 1001, and 2002.

Beyond Words
:
The concept extends to sequences of letters, numbers, or even musical notes.

Purpose:
Palindromes can be used for games, puzzles, and even literary devices like constrained writing.


List of Palindromic Books



* * * * * * *

A Lost Generation 
by Jonathan Reed

I am part of a lost generation.
And I refuse to believe that
I can change the world.
I realize this may be a shock, but
“Happiness comes from within”
Is a lie, and
“Money will make me happy”
So in thirty years, I will tell my children
They are not the most important thing in my life.
My employer will know that
I have my priorities straight because
Work
Is more important than
Family
I tell you this:
Once upon a time
Families stayed together
But this will not be true in my era.
This is a quick fix society
Experts tell me
Thirty years from now, I will be celebrating the tenth anniversary of my divorce.
I do not concede that
I will live in a country of my own making.
In the future,
Environmental destruction will be the norm.
No longer can it be said that
My peers and I care about this Earth.
It will be evident that
My generation is apathetic and lethargic.
It is foolish to presume that
There is hope.
And all of this will come true unless we choose reverse it.

- JR

Reed's poem was an entrant in a poetry contest in 2007 that makes a comment on generations of then and now. The poem is a showcase of cynicism and optimism. It’s still fitting for today because these ideas persist.

Smith Teaches 9 to 12

Also,



* * * * * * *

Doppelganger
by James A. Lindon
(Dmitri Borgmann’s Beyond Language – 1967).


Entering the lonely house with my wife
I saw him for the first time
Peering furtively from behind a bush —
Blackness that moved,
A shape amid the shadows,
A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes
Revealed in the ragged moon.

A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have

1 Put him to flight forever —
2 I dared not
3 (For reasons that I failed to understand),
4 Though I knew I should act at once.

5 I puzzled over it, hiding alone,
6 Watching the woman as she neared the gate.
7 He came, and I saw him crouching
8 Night after night.
8 Night after night
7 He came, and I saw him crouching,
6 Watching the woman as she neared the gate.

5 I puzzled over it, hiding alone —
4 Though I knew I should act at once,
3 For reasons that I failed to understand
2 I dared not
1 Put him to flight forever.

- JAL


A palindrome can be a word, phrase or sequence. A doppelganger (German for “double-walker”) is usually a ghostly image one sees of oneself in the mirror or walking around imitating the original human.

Lindon’s "Doppelgänger" is a masterful example of the line-unit palindrome. The poem reads forward and then mirrors itself backward in reverse order, creating a haunting, reflective effect - like looking into a mirror that returns the gaze - just like witnessing one's own doppelganger and impending demise.
The poem begins with a sequence of lines, then reverses those same lines, maintaining a precise, atmospheric symmetry.
This structure makes the poem a vivid exploration of reflection and repetition even as the meanings change.

* * * * * * *


Su Hui with her great palindrome, the Xuanji Tu.

Star Gauge

The Star Gauge (Chinese: 璇璣圖; pinyin: xuán jī tú), or translated as "the armillary sphere chart", is the posthumous title given to a 4th-century Chinese poem written by the Sixteen Kingdoms (304-439 AD) poet Su Hui for her husband. It consists of a 29 by 29 grid of characters, forming a reversible poem that can be read in different ways to form roughly 3,000 smaller rhyming poems. The outer border forms a single circular poem, thought to be both the first and the longest of its kind.

Description
The Star Gauge consists of 841 characters in a grid. The original was described by contemporary sources as shuttle-woven on brocade. It was composed by Su Hui during a time when East Asian Mādhyamaka was one of the predominant philosophical schools in the area.

The outer border is meant to be read in a circle. The grid is known as a palindrome poem, and can be read in different ways to generate over 3,000 shorter poems, in which the second line of every couplet rhymes with that of the next. The largest set of such poems are 2,848 four-liners with seven characters per line. In the image below, the maroon grid is made up of 32 seven-character phrases. These may be read in certain patterns around the perimeter, and in other patterns for the internal grid. Other poems can be formed by reading characters from the other colored sections.

Su Hui's Xuanji Tu palindrome poem in simplified characters (left)
 and in the original traditional characters (right)

History of the poem and its retelling
Early sources focused on the circular poem composing the outer border of the grid, consisting of 112 characters. Later sources described the whole grid of 840 characters (not counting the central character 心 xin, meaning "heart", which lends meaning to the whole but is not part of any of the smaller poems).

The text of the poem was circulated continuously in medieval China and was never lost, but during the Song dynasty it became scarce. The 112-character version was included in early sources. The earliest surviving excerpts of the entire grid version date from a 10th-century text by Li Fang.

While sources agree that Su was a talented poet, the background story and interpretation of the poem changed over the centuries, from the lament of a wife longing for her husband, to a wife worrying about her husband fighting on the frontier, to a jealous wife competing for her husband's affections.

By the Tang period, a popular story of Su Hui's life was attributed to empress Wu Zetian, though this is likely a creative misattribution for narrative effect. This included the following description of the poem:
Dou Tao of Qinzhou was exiled to the desert, away from his wife Lady Su. Upon departure from Su, Dou swore that he would not marry another person. However, as soon as he arrived in the desert region, he married someone. Lady Su composed a circular poem, wove it into a piece of brocade, and sent it to him.
Another source, naming the poem as Xuanji Tu (Picture of the Turning Sphere), claimed that the grid as a whole was a palindromic poem comprehensible only to Dou (which would explain why none of the Tang sources reprinted it), and that when he read it, he left his desert wife and returned to Su Hui.

Some 13th-century copies were attributed to famous women of the Song dynasty, but falsely so. The poem was also mentioned in the novel Flowers in the Mirror.