I don't necessarily think it's cheating, but that does touch on part of what I had in mind with the Dunbar/Thomas contrast. There's a sense in which the Dunbar is a truer repetend: it really is the same thing, repeated. Whereas Thomas is repeating the lines exactly, but in a sense not exactly repeating them. The words are the same, but not the sense. And what Susan is talking about is the next step away from a "true" repetition: the words stay in the same order, but the punctuation changes how they get broken up. There are still further steps away one can take: I've seen villanelles that play with homophony to interesting effect (though not so interesting that I remember their names, apparently). And so forth.
By "truer" I of course do not mean "better," in the sense that truer repetition will lead to a better poem. All of them can lead to good poems, well-handled. But I do find the distinction between types of repetition interesting, and I suspect that lines will need different properties to function well when repeated in these different ways. I mean this beyond the obvious grammatical properties require to do what Thomas did, or what Susan is talking about. What about semantic and other non-grammatical properties. Are there any that seem especially well-suited to particular forms of repetition?
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