How Repetition and Circular Lines Go Past the End
A staple of my poetry is circular lines. I never sacrifice line tension over it, but I often find they go hand in hand, and I love being able to read the same line in as many different ways as possible.
Inversely, I often hold myself to a rule that any word used in a poem is unavailable for reuse, even for the next few poems. If possible, I’d prefer each of my poems to have its own unique vocabulary. This is not to say repetition is a detriment — it is a tool to be used cautiously.
Repetition
Repetition reinforces and recontextualizes.
In David Hernadez’s poem “The Soldier Inside the Horse”, the narrative is as direct as the title: a soldier takes advantage of a horse carcass as a disguise and shield on the battlefield. The rifle is aimed through the mouth, waiting to provide company.
“Horse” is used six times in the poem. It is present in lines one, seven, eighteen, and twenty-one. The horse — or at least, the concept of a horse — only draws breath in the last stanza:
“a pony. The horse once a horse,
galloping where the world was green” (Hernandez).
This contrast between the world as it is and what it was is intentionally blurred with matter-of-fact repetition. The horse is not a horse, but they were a horse, and they should continue to be referred to as one. As a horse, they serve the soldier, even beyond death. The horror is to be respected, not submitted to.
In contrast, despite being the same species, the word “pony” appears only once in the poem (Hernandez). This is to emphasize the ending. A reminder that the horse — used up like an expired pumpkin — was once a child, not a vehicle birthed from a conveyor belt.
For other words that appear more than once, bluegrass, gouged, smoldering, and so appear two times; boy and green, three; battlefield, four; soldier, five; and once, nine. Variations of the word “eye” appear three times on lines ten and fifteen as well: eye, eyes, and eyeholes (Hernandez).
As the word that shows up most, “once” is nostalgic in a “look what we let ourselves become” sort of way. The repetition also allows the narrator to jump back and forth in time, imitating a soldier’s PTSD. One of the most striking examples of this revolves around eye anatomy. Lines ten and eleven describe how the soldier sees through the carcass while inside:
“once the eye sockets cradled eye
and now peepholes for the soldier” (Hernandez).
Lines fifteen and sixteen parallel the soldier’s technique with a boy’s makeshift ghost costume:
“Once a ghost for Halloween with eyeholes
scissored into a bedsheet. An enemy” (Hernandez).
Besides the imagery of treating a horse like a bedsheet, the costume choice intentionally points to death. “An enemy” (Hernandez) is shot promptly after this flashback, which could either belong to them or the soldier inside the horse. The repetition of “once” blurs the proximity.
Another poem utilizing repetition is Paige Lewis’ “So You Want to Leave Purgatory”. In it, the poetic voice instructs the reader to showcase why they will stay here forever.
The reader is entrusted with a knife and meets a calf with a rope tied around their neck. The test is obvious: they are not supposed to kill the calf for food, regardless of their intense hunger. It is only long after completing it that the reader realizes this was not the test. It was whether or not the reader would think about the calf’s well-being beyond just sparing it from murder: cutting the rope around the calf’s neck before the calf grows enough to choke on it. The reader forgets this lesson when it is time to be handed a knife again.
The words walk, calf, neck, rope, think, test, and teeth appear more than once, emphasizing that the reader’s focus resides with hunger and emotional fatigue. This is important to establish sympathy between the reader acting as the audience and the reader acting as a character. The reader, as a character, barely has enough energy to avoid eating the calf, but will presumably have enough energy to continue doing so.
The more prominent repetition, however, lies in the sentences that begin and end the poem. They are both the same: “here, take this knife” (Lewis). The first appearance of this is an instruction to set the scene. The second appearance recontextualizes it as a cruel reminder; because the reader does not know it is one, they can never learn to escape the endless cycle in their current state. The reader is in purgatory because they either can’t stockpile enough conviction or experience to free the calf entirely. Either way, it is a luxury to judge with a full stomach.
Circular Lines
Circular lines are lines with two starts: the beginning of the line itself, and a beginning that can be read as one in a vacuum, with the line circling back to itself.
For example, “we skinned the copper off pennies. When Rome fell again,” is a line that could theoretically be in a poem. The first half — “we skinned the copper off pennies” — is the end of one sentence. The second half — “When Rome fell again,” — is the start of another. If the line is in isolation, the two halves can trade places: “When Rome fell again, we skinned the copper off pennies”.
As a published example, consider the transition to the aforementioned last stanza of “The Soldier Inside the Horse” — particularly, the second-to-last line:
“scissored into a bedsheet. An enemy
crosses the battlefield so gunfire
from the mouth of the horse,
so death. The man inside a solider,
the soldier once a boy who wanted” (Hernandez).
As the horse was once a pony, so was the soldier once a man. That man used to be a boy until he grew up. That man died when they ended their life by taking another’s, becoming a soldier, but who is the man inside the soldier? The answer — or maybe what the soldier wants to be the answer — is plainly found in the circular line: “the man inside a soldier, so death”.
Without considering the circular, “so death” (Hernandez) is the curt consequence for the opposing soldier not hiding in something akin to a dead horse, so bullet. So impact. The chronological and circular reading presents a double meaning.
In the version of “So You Want to Leave Purgatory” within Paige Lewis’ Space Struck, there are two circular lines between stanzas three and six:
“around its neck. Climb over
the fence. Hold the rope like a leash.
You haven’t eaten in years. Think—
are you being tested? Yes, everything
here is a test. Stop baring teeth
upon teeth and leave the calf
to its grazing. Lift your arms toward
the sky and receive nothing. Keep” (Lewis).
The circular lines here are the first and last. The first circular line (“Climb over around its neck”) signals what the narrator says the reader does. They climb around the calf’s neck, not realizing they are already at their destination if they remove the rope. The other circular line (“Keep the sky and receive nothing”) is the result of the reader’s decision: they have everything underneath the sky when all they want is to go above it.
The second-to-last line in these stanzas is almost circular except for “together” and “to” being side-by-side, as these prepositions become redundant. However, the older version of “So You Want to Leave Purgatory” published in Indiana Review has a different line structure:
“grazing. You lift your arms toward” (Lewis).
As a circular line, “you lift your arms toward grazing” is a description, not a command. Lewis likely revised these sections of the poem to be more commanding, so it stands to reason this simple circular line was unintentional, and maybe all of them here are. Still, “you lift your arms towards grazing” strikes me as the character of the reader using the space between the lines to hold their own thoughts. When lifting their arms to the sky, they might be envisioning food finally appearing in their hands; to someone who has not eaten for years, that could be heaven enough.
Operationalizing
Circular lines will rarely be noticed. Even when I point out instances directly to the authors themselves, they always say it was unintended. Regardless, I believe it adds depth to a poem when an entirely new sentence arises as an option, and those who look out for them will appreciate the poem that much more if it relates to the overarching material.
With the commanding nature of Paige Lewis’ “So You Want to Leave Purgatory” and my interpretation of the reader hiding thoughts from the narrator in the circular line later revised, I wonder whether another poem could be based on this concept. The primary narrative would operate similarly to how Lewis controls the reader for their own, with the secondary belonging to the reader themselves within several circular lines.
Another poem I wrote in a group activity had each line as circular. We named it “Schrödinger’s Fat”, with the premise being Garfield on the brink of death from indulging a gluttonous amount of lasagna. The poem ends by looping back to the beginning. Garfield is always alive and dead before, during, and after each line.
Of course, quality should always be prioritized over quantity. It is important not to fall into the trap of disproportionality, focusing on a craft choice solely to pursue it.
Repetition is easily able to overstay its welcome as well. Perhaps the most famous, or infamous, example of this is the grammatically correct buffalo sentence that only uses the word “buffalo”. William J. Rapaport recorded the full history of this development in “A History of the Sentence ‘Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo’”. In short, the buffalo sentence operates with each usage of “buffalo” differing from the other in terms of definitions and parts of speech.
The buffalo sentence inspired a sestina I wrote as a writing exercise, entitled “Heads Will Be Buffaloed.” A sestina is a poetic form of six stanzas with six lines consistently ending on six end-words appearing in a strict order, followed by a three-line envoi. In my buffalo sentence sestina, I broke the rule that each of the six end-words must be different from the other. I made all of them “buffalo”, and to maintain the spirit of the sentence, each line always had ten syllables for an average of three “buffalo” to appear in them.
Eventually, “Heads Will Be Buffaloed” got condensed to three stanzas, appearing at the end of another draft of another poem. This was unavoidable, as there are only so many ways to say “buffalo” in a single poem for a minimum of forty-two times, and upwards to one hundred seventeen, without it feeling overly repetitive.
At least, it was good practice to prolong a word’s welcome by utilizing every possible definition of a word. This same kind of approach can be used with the word David Hernandez uses most in “The Soldier Inside the Horse”.
“Once” can be used as an adjective (only existing in the past), an adverb (formerly or ever, or contingent on a single point), a conjunction (the moment of), and a noun (a singular time)—despite the similarities in their definitions (Merriam-Webster).
The “once” in “a battlefield once green” (Hernandez) acts as an adverb, but it can communicate the same information through other forms:
ADVERB: “A battlefield once green” (Hernandez)
ADJECTIVE: “A once green battlefield”
CONJUNCTION: “Once it is gouged, the green will smolder into a battlefield”
NOUN: “Once is all that is needed to turn all this green inside out”
Like circular lines, it is not a requirement to utilize all possibilities at once. How often a word or line is revisited is between the author’s intent and the reader’s interpretation. The distance of the gap is up to both, and as writers, repetition acts as one guide of many from our end.
Citations:
“Glossary of Poetic Terms | Sestina.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/sestina. Accessed 17 Dec. 2025.
Hernadez, David. “The Soldier Inside the Horse.” The Missouri Review, Volume 28, Number 1. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/183630/pdf
Lewis, Paige. “So You Want to Leave Purgatory.” Indiana Review, Volume 38, Issue 2. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/openview/ed4dbb5ec4ee8ca22e95dc4115d870ba/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=45918
Lewis, Paige. “So You Want to Leave Purgatory.” Space Struck, Sarabande Books, 2019.
“Once.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/once.
Rapaport, William. “A History of the Sentence ‘Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.” 2015. https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/buffalobuffalo.html. Accessed 14 Dec. 2025.