Antimetabole
Quick answer: Antimetabole repeats the words of a phrase in reverse order, as in shaping the poem until the poem shapes you. Learn how this mirrored device works.
Antimetabole is the repetition of the words of a phrase or clause in reverse order: an AB, BA pattern in which the same words come back mirrored, as in you shape the poem until the poem shapes you. The Greek name means turning about. Because the second half reuses the first half's exact vocabulary, the reversal feels both inevitable and surprising, which is why the figure produces so many quotable sentences.
Speechwriters treat antimetabole as a reliable applause machine, and poets treat it with slightly more suspicion, because its neatness can overpower a quiet poem. Used precisely, though, it does something no other figure quite manages: it dramatises reversal itself, power changing hands, subject becoming object, lover becoming beloved, in the space of a single breath.
How It Works
The mirror redistributes force. An original example: I carried the grief so long that the grief carried me. Nothing new enters the second clause, yet everything changes, because the grammar swaps who acts and who is acted upon. That swap is the figure's whole argument. Antimetabole persuades by symmetry: the reversed clause sounds like a discovered law rather than an assertion, and readers accept laws more readily than opinions. The craft lies in making sure the reversal is true as well as tidy.
Where You Will See It
Shakespeare opens Macbeth with the witches' fair is foul, and foul is fair, a mirrored motto for a play about inversions. John F. Kennedy's inaugural address contains the most famous modern example, the sentence asking citizens to reverse the direction of a familiar question about country and self. Proverbs and aphorisms hoard the figure, eat to live rather than live to eat descends from classical sources, and sports talk, advertising and political slogans recycle its shape daily because mirrored sentences are effortless to remember.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Place antimetabole where the poem's power genuinely reverses: a turn, an ending, the hinge of a sonnet. Keep the mirrored elements short, two or three words each, so the reversal lands in one hearing. Allow small grammatical adjustments, carried and carries, without guilt, since strict word-for-word inversion can produce nonsense. Then interrogate the line: is the reversal an insight or just a trick of symmetry? A mirrored sentence that survives that question tends to become the line readers quote back to you.
What poets can take from this
- Keep each mirrored element to two or three words so the reversal lands at once.
- Position the figure at a genuine turn in the poem, not as passing ornament.
- Adjust inflections freely; the mirror needs the same words, not the same endings.
- Check that the reversed statement is actually true, since symmetry can fake wisdom.
- Use at most one antimetabole per poem; two mirrors turn a poem into a hall of them.
Try it yourself
Write a poem about a relationship in which the balance of power shifts, and let a single antimetabole in the final two lines carry the entire reversal. Draft the mirrored line first, then write the poem that earns it.
Questions
What is the difference between antimetabole and chiasmus?
Antimetabole reverses the same words, AB then BA. Chiasmus mirrors grammatical structure without needing the same words. Every antimetabole is a chiasmus, but many rhetoricians reserve chiasmus for the looser, structure-only mirror.
How do you pronounce antimetabole?
An-tee-meh-TAB-oh-lee, five syllables with the stress on tab. The final e is voiced, as in hyperbole.
Why is antimetabole so common in speeches?
Mirrored sentences are compact, rhythmic and almost impossible to forget, and the reversal creates an instant sense of insight. Audiences hear the pattern complete itself and respond as if to a proof.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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