» Out with the old. In with the new. Looking for change and good fortune this coming year.

New Year's is always fraught with looking both forward and backward. This brings to mind that old wordplay game, Palindromes.

Good palindromes should make some sort of syntactical sense (Able was I ere I saw Elba) (Dennis and Edna Sinned) (A man, A plan, A Canal, Panama)

Here's my personal favourite. This poem's first line is the greatest palindrome EVER "Flee to me remote elf".
Unfortunately the rest of the poem is merely silly and not very true to the syntax idea. Still fun tho'.
The folowing lines read the same backward and forward.

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Flee to me, remote elf—Sal a dewan desired;
Now is a Late-Petal Era.
We fade: lucid Iris, red Rose of Sharon;
Goldenrod a silly ram ate.
Wan olives teem (ah, Satan lives!);
A star eyes pale Roses.

Revel, big elf on a mayonnaise man—
A tinsel baton-dragging nice elf too.
Lisp, oh sibyl, dragging Nola along;
Niggardly bishops I loot.
Fleecing niggard notables Nita names,
I annoy a Man of Legible Verse.

So relapse, ye rats,
As evil Natasha meets Evil
On a wet, amaryllis-adorned log.
Norah's foes' orders (I ridiculed a few) are late, Pet.
Alas, I wonder! Is Edna wed?
Alas—flee to me remote elf.
— Howard W. Bergeron (from Willard Espy's Almanac of Words at Play)
¶ 1/01/2006  |   0 comments