Lipogram in Verse

A poem without the letter s:

Oh! come to-night; for naught can charm
The weary time when thou’rt away.
Oh! come; the gentle moon hath thrown
O’er bower and hall her quivering ray.
The heather-bell hath mildly flung,
From off her fairy leaf, the bright
And diamond dew-drop that had hung
Upon that leaf — a gem of light.
Then come, love, come!

To-night the liquid wave hath not —
Illumined by the moonlit beam
Playing upon the lake beneath,
Like frolic in an Autumn dream —
The liquid wave hath not, to-night,
In all her moonlilt pride, a fair
Gift like to them that on thy lip
Do breathe and laugh, and home it there.
Then come, love, come!

To-night! to-night! my gentle one,
The flower-bearing Amra tree
Doth long, with fragrant moan, to meet
The love-lip of the honey-bee.
But not the Amra tree can long
To greet the bee, at evening light,
With half the deep, fond love I long
To meet my Nama here to-night.
Then come, love, come!

From George Wakeman, “Tormenting the Alphabet,” Galaxy, 1866.

See also Nevermore.

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A Reversible Honor

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/642561

The neatest and prettiest [palindrome] that has yet appeared comes from a highly cultivated lady who was attached to the court of Queen Elizabeth. Having been banished from the court on suspicion of too great familiarity with a nobleman in high favor, the lady adopted this device — a moon covered by a cloud — and the following palindrome for a motto —

ABLATA AT ALBA. (Secluded but Pure.)

The merit of this kind of composition was never in any example so heightened by appropriateness and delicacy of sentiment.

— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882

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“Idling I Sit in This Mild Twilight Dim”

A univocalic is a poem that uses only one vowel. This example was composed by Charles Bombaugh in 1875:

Incontrovertible Facts

No monk too good to rob, or cog or plot.
No fool so gross to bolt Scotch collops hot.
From Donjon tops no Oronooko rolls.
Logwood, not lotos, floods Oporto’s bowls.
Troops of old tosspots oft to sot consort.
Box tops odd schoolboys oft do flog for sport.
No cool monsoons blow soft on Oxford dons,
Orthodox, jog-trot, book-worm Solomons!
Bold Ostrogoths of ghosts no horror show.
On London shop-fronts no hop-blossoms grow.
To crocks of gold no dodo looks for food.
On soft cloth footstools no old fox doth brood.
Long storm-tost sloops forlorn work on to port.
Rooks do not roost on spoons, nor woodcocks snort,
Nor dog on snowdrop or on coltsfoot rolls,
Nor common frog concocts long protocols.

| Language · Poems

“An Alphabetical Wooing”

Let others talk of L N’s eyes,
And K T’s figure light and free,
Say L R, too, is beautiful —
I heed them not while U I C.
U need not N V them, for U
X L them all, my M L E.
I have no words when I would tell
How much in love with U I B.
So sweet U R, my D R E,
I love your very F E G;
And when you speak or sign, your voice
Is like a winsome L O D.
When U R I C, hope D K’s,
I am a mere non- N T T.
Such F E K C has your smile,
It shields from N E N M E.
For love so deep as mine, I fear,
There is no other M E D.
But that you love me back again —
O, thought of heavenly X T C;
So, lest my M T heart and I
Should sing for love an L E G,
T’s me no more — B Y’s, B kind,
O, M L E, U R, I C!

— Anonymous, cited in Carolyn Wells, A Whimsey Anthology, 1906

| Language · Poems

Recursive Gratitude

Mathematician J.E. Littlewood once wrote a paper for the French journal Comptes Rendus. A Prof. M. Riesz did the translation, and at the end Littlewood found three footnotes:

I am greatly indebted to Prof. Riesz for translating the present paper.

I am indebted to Prof. Riesz for translating the preceding footnote.

I am indebted to Prof. Riesz for translating the preceding footnote.

Littlewood notes that this could have gone on indefinitely but “I stop legitimately at number 3: however little French I know I am capable of copying a French sentence.”

| Language · Science & Math

Back and Forth

Most people think of palindromes as being symmetrical arrangements of letters:

SIT ON A POTATO PAN, OTIS.

But they can also work at the level of individual words:

FALL LEAVES AFTER LEAVES FALL.

YOU CAN CAGE A SWALLOW, CAN’T YOU, BUT YOU CAN’T SWALLOW A CAGE, CAN YOU?

And even phonetically: The Hungarian phrase a bátya gatyába (“the brother in underpants”) and the Japanese ta-ke-ya-bu ya-ke-ta (“a bamboo grove has been burned”) (both transliterated here) sound the same when reversed.

Bonus palindrome, by Stephen Fry:

RETTEBS IFLAHD NOCES, EH? TTU, BUT THE SECOND HALF IS BETTER.

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