Epanalepsis

Epanalepsis (Greek, 'taking up again') is the figure in which the opening word or phrase of a clause is repeated at its close. 'The king is dead; long live the king.' 'Nothing is worse than doing nothing.' 'Man's inhumanity to man.' The pattern — A … A — encloses the sentence and gives it a strong sense of return, of the ending answering the beginning.

The effect is emphatic and, often, meditative: the mind of the reader is brought back to the opening term, now seen through everything the sentence has done between the two occurrences. Because the figure is so audible, it is common in oratory, aphorism, and biblical prose, and rare in relaxed conversational writing.

Epanalepsis is distinct from anaphora (repetition at the beginning of successive clauses) and epistrophe (repetition at the ends). It is closely related to the framing device sometimes called a bookend or ring-composition, and can operate on any scale — a single sentence, a paragraph, a whole essay whose closing sentence deliberately echoes its opening.

The figure needs a genuine reason to close the ring. If the repeated word means the same thing at both ends, the effect is decorative. If the repeated word has been changed — enlarged, deepened, or ironised — by the intervening material, the closing echo is doing real work.