This contains spoilers for Listener 4,549; which you might well enjoy solving first.
Solvers, setters: what does symmetry add to your enjoyment of crosswords?
I ask this – possibly heretical – question after only noticing very late in solving that a few recent puzzles in the Times’ Listener series have not been symmetrical. The solution has just been published for Emu’s From Where I’m Standing; Emu is known outside crosswords as John Finnemore and this excellent puzzle gradually got the solver to imagine its grid as an aerial view of a ziggurat (one of those old stacked-block buildings).
Once the grid was full, the solver was asked to imagine peering at the ziggurat from different points on the ground so as to discover the messages hidden in its “blocks”.
The final stage was a revelation: looking up from one of the corners revealed a message where some of the grid’s letters were doubled because you could “see” two faces of each corner block, revealing an author and title: EE CUMMINGS THE EAGLE.
I asked Emu how tricky it was to find a phrase with letter-pairs that worked; it turns out that he had spent some time with 19th-century American naval officer HH Gorringe, whose boat the Dessoug transported the Cleopatra’s Needle obelisk from Egypt to Manhattan: HH GORRINGE DESSOUG …
So, I worked on that for a while … but I knew I wanted another message from another vantage point, and struggled to find one. And then I got cold feet that he wasn’t just obscure, but someone basically no one has heard of, including me, before I went Wikipedia trawling. So I threw him and his needle overboard, started again, and looked for properly famous people with that pattern.
The other hidden message necessarily needed to overlap with EE CUMMINGS THE EAGLE in at least three places, but the gods of poetry and puzzling conspired to smile on Emu, since Cummings’ poem The Eagle contains these words …
Ever drifting, drifting away
Into the endless realms of day;
Finally ceasing
… from which ENDLESS REALMS OF DAY does just that.
Emu again:
Of course, that meant a lot of letters in preordained places, which made the grid-fill hard, and for a while I thought impossible … but then I chucked out symmetry. I don’t understand why symmetry is such a big deal anyway, except in carte blanche and jigsaw puzzles, where it’s useful to the solver.
Indeed. If asymmetry were a dealbreaker, we would have been denied this remarkable construction and a deeply pleasurable solve. So … why symmetry?
In more normal puzzles – normal meaning that there are black squares and that no one has to perform any imaginary architectural manoeuvres – there’s some aesthetic pleasure to a symmetrical grid.
That said, the first Manchester Guardian puzzle (pictured) is not exactly an eyesore.
When it comes to barred puzzles, there’s even less to notice.
Every other convention that setters are expected to follow – lots of overlap between acrosses and downs, connectedness in general, not to mention clueing conventions – is intended to make the solver’s time more enjoyable, even at the expense of the setter’s. Can you say that of symmetry?
Over to you.
Two final thoughts: first, it is some feat of Gorringe to transfer a 200-tonne edifice across the Atlantic and finally provide a rhyme for “orange” yet still remain an obscurity; second, here’s the Manchester Guardian puzzle in full:
