A Fascination with Anagrams

In a large number of Jeffrey Pethybridge’s poems, one can find anagrams and anagrammatic poetry styles; indeed, the title of his book is an anagram of his brother’s name. I looked into the history of anagrams in order to understand the appeal behind anagrammatic poetry and the use of scrambling important information to make new meanings. It turns out, anagrams have been prevalent throughout history, since perhaps even Ancient Greece, as a way of expressing hidden meanings or definitions behind a certain name or phrase. This practice was once called “themuru” which literally means “changing.” The practice was often used to find the mystical and mysterious meanings behind phrases or names heard in dreams, or to interpret the powers of that name in relation to a deity. Anagramming was considered an “Alchemy of Wit,” and was practiced as both a method of revealing secrets and of hiding them from prying eyes. One example of an anagram that expresses this especially well is from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. In this novel, the anagrammed name of Tom Marvolo Riddle is rescrambled, and reveals the phrase “I am Lord Voldemort,” thus revealing the truth behind the secret and the hidden powers of names. Anagrammatic poetry uses this method of scrambling and rescrambling phrases and words in order to pull out these hidden messages and give that name or phrase a double weight, both as simply what it is and what it reveals about itself through the play on words. Pethybridge uses anagrams in order to reveal certain aspects of his brother, the man’s suicide, and the poet’s debate over the state of the afterlife for a person who has committed suicide. The title seems to suggest both a eulogy for his brother as well as an attempt to find hope in darkness, a “striving” for something “bright,” but it is unclear whether this is fully reached. The murkiness of conclusions seems also to reflect the secrecy of word play and anagrams, as if his brother’s death were itself an anagram that he is trying to solve, but perhaps cannot.