The Palindrome as Art

The following poem was written by James A. Lindon and first published in Dmitri Borgmann's Beyond Language in 1967. It and some of the other examples below are taken from fun-with-words.com, which is linked in the title.

Doppelgänger

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
Put him to flight forever –
I dared not
(For reasons that I failed to understand),
Though I knew I should act at once.

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

I puzzled over it, hiding alone –
Though I knew I should act at once,
For reasons that I failed to understand
I dared not
Put him to flight forever.

A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have
Revealed in the ragged moon
A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes
A shape amid the shadows,
Blackness that moved.

Peering furtively from behind a bush,
I saw him, for the first time
Entering the lonely house with my wife.

Much more after the jump...


We're all familiar with palindromes. Sequences that read identically letter by letter from beginning to end or end to beginning.

Sometimes they're about transportation: race car; a Toyota. Or world leaders: able was I ere I saw Elba; a man, a plan, a canal, Panama! Often they make no sense at all, at best.

It's very difficult to generate more than trivial semantics or rudimentary aesthetics. But the palindrome concept also takes other forms, and greater chunking leads to increasingly interesting, meaningful, and artistic uses of language:

Blessed are they that believe that they are blessed.
Escher, drawing hands, drew hands drawing Escher.

Word-unit palindromes are somewhat reflexive, but because their elemental unit, the word, has intrinsic meaning, combining those building blocks opens up dimensions of expression all but unachievable by letter-palindromes. Because form is central to word palindromes, they tend to take on a poetical quality, particularly the better ones. That leads to the most interesting form of palindrome, the line-unit palindrome poem. As an astute reader of Liquid Ridiculous, you have no doubt recognized that Doppelgänger is just such a poem.

Unlike letter and word palindromes, whose meaning or artistic value is shoehorned into the form, line palindromes have enough structural freedom that the form and substance can complement and enhance one another. Doppelgänger literally translates as "double goer," and so the poem does. Structurally, of course, the last line follows the first no more than the first line follows the last, coming and going simultaneously. But unlike a letter or word palindrome, the poem presents multiple meanings going in both directions.

The story the poem tells is both linear and circular. There is also a progression of events that seems to continue forward even as the poem reverses itself halfway through. The narrator is aware of the stranger's doings, yet timidity or some other force prevents him from acting. In each half the stranger moves closer to his obscure goal. The poem, despite ending where it begins, takes a man who previously only watched from a distance and brings him to the object of his nightly vigil, and it reduces a man to a seemingly helpless bystander as another goes into his house with his wife.

A doppelgänger is also a ghostly, sinister double of a person, and the poem trades on that meaning as well. Near the crossover point, the identities of the narrator and the stranger blur. In the second stanza, the person hiding and crouching seems to be the wrong one for that half of the poem. Before the turn, the narrator is hiding and watching the woman, even though at the beginning he was entering the house with his wife. After the turn the stranger seems to be moving about, ultimately to the house, while the narrator is hiding in the bushes, yet in that half the stranger is the one crouching and watching. The ambiguity of identity introduced in the middle suggests a different interpretation of what the action means: there is but one man, watching himself, and in turn watching his (imaginary?) counterpart watching him. We have returned, in a sense, to Escher drawing hands drawing Escher.