Symploce
Quick answer: Symploce combines anaphora and epistrophe, repeating one phrase at the start and another at the end of successive lines. Learn how this rare device works.
Symploce is the combination of anaphora and epistrophe: successive lines, clauses or sentences begin with one repeated word or phrase and end with another. Each unit is framed at both edges, and only its middle changes. The name comes from a Greek word for weaving together, which describes the effect exactly: fixed threads at the margins, variation shuttling between them.
It is the rarest of the repetition figures in the wild, because it is the most constraining: with both ends locked, the writer has only the middle to work with. That constraint is also its power. Symploce sounds deliberate, ceremonial, almost legal, and poets deploy it when they want a passage to feel like a verdict being read out.
How It Works
Take an original example: When the letter came, I said nothing. When the war came, I said nothing. When you came back, I said nothing. The opening frame, when the, marks time; the closing frame, I said nothing, marks the speaker's failure; and the swapped middles, letter, war, you, escalate the stakes. The reader's attention is squeezed onto the one moving part, so a single changed word does the work a whole stanza might do elsewhere. That focus is the entire craft of the figure.
Where You Will See It
Classical rhetoricians catalogued symploce from Greek and Roman oratory, and it has stayed mostly an orator's device. A famous modern instance is Bill Clinton's 1995 speech after the Oklahoma City bombing, where successive sentences open with the same conditional phrase and close with the same call to stand against it. In poetry it appears in liturgical and anaphoric traditions, in the Psalms in translation, and in contemporary protest and performance poetry, where the double frame turns a stanza into a chant an audience can join by the second repetition.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Reserve symploce for the poem's highest pressure point, and keep the run to three units, four at most, since the double lock exhausts an ear quickly. Make the middle terms escalate rather than merely vary: each substitution should raise the stakes or shrink the distance to the speaker. And give real thought to what happens after the pattern, because the first unframed line will feel like release whatever it says. Write that line last, and make it worth the cage you built before it.
What poets can take from this
- Limit symploce to three or four units; the double frame tires readers fast.
- Make the changing middle terms escalate toward the speaker, not just vary.
- Keep both repeated frames short so the middle stays audible.
- Use it at the poem's climax, not its opening, since everything after feels like release.
- Test it aloud; symploce is built for the voice and often reads stiffer than it sounds.
Try it yourself
Write a three-sentence poem where every sentence begins 'In the house where' and ends 'we never spoke of it', changing only the middle. Then add one final sentence with neither frame, and let it break the silence the frames enforced.
Questions
What is the difference between symploce, anaphora and epistrophe?
Anaphora repeats at the beginnings of successive units, epistrophe at the ends, and symploce does both at once, framing each unit with two fixed repetitions. Symploce is therefore the strictest and rarest of the three.
How do you pronounce symploce?
SIM-ploh-see, three syllables, from the Greek for an interweaving. Some speakers say SIM-ploh-kee, closer to the Greek, and both are understood.
Is symploce too artificial for modern poetry?
It is conspicuous, so it suits poems that want a ceremonial or incantatory register, and performance work where audiences respond to the double pattern. In quiet conversational poems it usually feels overdressed.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.