Chiasmus
Quick answer: Chiasmus is a device that mirrors grammatical structure across two phrases in an ABBA pattern. Learn how it differs from antimetabole, with examples.
Chiasmus is a figure in which the grammatical structure of one phrase is mirrored in reverse by the next, an ABBA pattern named after the Greek letter chi, whose X shape diagrams the crossing. Strictly speaking, the words themselves need not repeat: sweet was the labour, the reward bitter mirrors adjective and noun across the comma without reusing either word. When the same words do return in reverse, most rhetoricians call that stricter figure antimetabole.
The terminology is genuinely contested, and you should know it: plenty of respected handbooks use chiasmus as the umbrella term covering both the structural mirror and the word-for-word reversal. What matters for a poet is the crossing itself, a shape that makes two halves of a line answer each other like reflections.
How It Works
The first half sets a grammatical order; the second half walks it backwards, and the reversal creates balance with tension inside it. An original example: loud were the mourners, and the grave lay quiet. Adjective before subject, then subject before adjective: the syntax crosses, and the meaning crosses with it, noise against silence, the living against the dead. Because the pattern is structural rather than verbal, chiasmus can be subtle, felt as elegance rather than spotted as a trick, which suits poems that want symmetry without spectacle.
Where You Will See It
Alexander Pope, the great engineer of the balanced line, crosses structures constantly; his description of humanity, his time a moment, and a point his space, mirrors noun and measure across the comma. Keats ends his Grecian urn with beauty is truth, truth beauty, a crossing so famous it names the debate about what such mirrors mean. The device saturates Hebrew poetry in translation, where paired verses mirror each other's structure, and biblical scholars analyse whole chapters as long-range chiastic patterns.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Chiasmus rewards poems built on opposition: day and night, love and grief, before and after. Draft the two halves separately, then reverse the second half's order and listen for the click. Keep the mirrored units grammatically clean, since a muddy reversal reads as accident. In metred verse the crossing sits beautifully across a caesura; in free verse, across a line break. One earned chiasmus can quietly lift a poem's language score in a judged contest, because the crossed line is usually the one a judge rereads.
What poets can take from this
- Build chiasmus on genuine oppositions so the crossed structure carries meaning.
- Draft both halves plainly first, then reverse the second and compare.
- Place the crossing at a caesura or line break so the mirror is audible.
- Keep the mirrored grammar clean; approximate reversals read as accidents.
- Say antimetabole when the exact words reverse, and expect some books to disagree.
Try it yourself
Choose two opposed nouns that belong to your life, perhaps kitchen and hospital, or coast and city, and write a poem whose final couplet crosses them in an ABBA structure without repeating any other word from the poem.
Questions
What is the difference between chiasmus and antimetabole?
Chiasmus mirrors grammatical structure in an ABBA pattern and does not require repeated words; antimetabole reverses the very same words. Usage varies, and many writers use chiasmus loosely to cover both figures.
Why is it called chiasmus?
From the Greek letter chi, written as X. If you draw lines connecting the corresponding elements of the two phrases, they cross in the middle, making the letter's shape.
Is chiasmus old-fashioned?
The heavily balanced eighteenth-century couplet is out of fashion; the crossing itself is not. Contemporary poets still use structural mirrors at turns and endings, just with quieter diction than Pope allowed himself.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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