Epistrophe is the repetition of the same word or phrase at the end of successive clauses. It is anaphora's mirror image, and it behaves differently: where a repeated opening builds anticipation, a repeated ending delivers a verdict, each clause landing on the same note.
Because the repetition arrives last, it is the phrase the listener is left holding.
Paul, in the King James translation: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.” Three clauses, each ending identically. The subject shifts — speech, understanding, thought — but every one resolves back to the same condition.
A passage that opens and closes its clauses with the same words is using symploce, which combines epistrophe with anaphora.
Epistrophe is less common than anaphora and generally more emphatic, for a structural reason: English sentences carry their weight at the end. A repeated opening can fade into rhythm, something the ear stops noticing after the third pass. A repeated ending cannot, because each clause drives toward it.
This makes the device well suited to conclusions and badly suited to exposition. Used early in an argument it forecloses too soon, insisting on a resolution the reader has not yet been given reason to accept. Used at the close, it gathers what came before into a single phrase.
The device makes no claim of its own and so appears nowhere in the fallacy library. What it does is confer finality, and finality is not the same as proof. A reader who notices that every clause has landed on the same words is being invited to treat the matter as settled, and should check whether anything in the passage actually settled it.
