An Isogram is shy of icons
It only likes sole runes alone
No want for right or for wrong
And a word as bare as bone
Pangrams, however, need them all:
Judge my vow, you sphinx of black quartz,
They require all twenty six letters to call:
Glib jocks quiz nymph to vex dwarf
While acrostics aim to organise
On or across the lines
Revealing a message in disguise
Divined by reading the signs
Palindromes read the same each way
(A madam’s kayak, or a redder racecar)
Ambidextrous words are at play;
A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!
Semordnilaps playfully reverse meaning
Like a mood of doom when one redips in the tub
Adding a slant, they can be demeaning
See Milkwood’s village of Llareggub
Spoonerisms are named for a man in Oxford
With whose mistakes we’re now so enamoured
He believed the Lord was a shoving leopard
And liked to dine on a soul of ballad
The tautogram takes text to totality
Letting letters lie languorously low
Slow slurring sentences so sluggishly
Not needing neologisms, no no
The tautonym rhythms pound away
Dum-dums go pum-pum on tom-toms
Dodos and dik-diks whip and nae-nae
As the go-go girls suck their bon-bons
Anagrams I’m sure that you know
‘Eleven plus two’ is ‘twelve plus one’
Stirred up letters in words that flow
And in ‘conversation’, ‘voices rant on’
An antigram can be similar,
But only when in opposition
United untied, be restful or fluster;
A real fun funeral, silent – listen
Wordplay excites a logophile
But beware of logomania
Count your syllables in exile
Thou bohemians in Transylvania
