Epanalepsis or Round and Round.

In my beginning is my end...

Were you ever taught that in a speech you should go round in a circle? You start with a story about, say, a fish swimming upstream against all the currents and compare the person you are making a speech about to that fish. At the end of the speech, you gently remind the audience of the fish so you finish exactly where you started.

Epanalepsis is an old journalists' trick. A story starts and ends with the same words.

Start: “An MP was complaining to me about the lack of transgendered people in parliament. Why, she asked, is this?”
Finish: “And that is why, in parliament, there is not one transgendered MP.”

Start: “Mr Buggins is a man who breeds horses just outside Birmingham in Wolverhampton. He maintains that breeding horses in Birmingham itself is impossible for the following reasons.”
Finish: “So horses do not flourish in Birmingham but they do in Wolverhampton. You are quite correct, Mr Buggins.”

It works very well for sentences too.

The king is dead, long live the king!

Man's inhumanity to man.

Make sure the first word and the last are exactly the same! Otherwise the epanalepsis doesn't work at all.

Man's inhumanity to woman. 

The king is dead, long live the queen!

Epanalepsis! Advertisers, the Bible, authors - all love completing the circle with an epanalepsis!

"Always Low Prices. Always." (Walmart slogan)

"Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, Rejoice." (The Bible, Phil. 4.4)

We know nothing of one another, nothing. Smiley mused. However closely we live together, at whatever time of day or night we sound the deepest thoughts in one another, we know nothing." (John le Carré, Call for the Dead, 1961)

And now a very sad epanalepsis:

"They went home and told their wives,
 that never once in all their lives,
 had they known a girl like me,
 but… they went home."
"They Went Home," Maya Angelou.

In my end is my beginning.

A level students only

Did you get the TS Eliot quote? Picture at top of page. Ugly old devil wasn't he!