Alliteration II

By Murray Alfredson

Apart from following ancient alliterative verse forms, we can apply the lessons of the ancients in three ways. We can alliterate informally, in a relaxed and occasional manner, though sometimes quite intensively. Still alliterating informally, we can practise this more or less consistently through a poem. And we can learn the discipline of composing short lined poems.

a) Masters such as Rainer Maria Rilke have used informal alliteration extensively, sometimes through a number of lines and with interweaving alliteration on several consonant sounds. Here is an example from the opening of Rilke’s ‘Fifth elegy’, with alliteration on several consonants, ‘t’, ‘p’, ‘k’, ‘l’, the glottal plosive and also a patch of mid-line rhyme in the free verse. The alliteration seems to reinforce the feel of almost frenzied excitement induced by Rilke’s way of interrupting his flow with interjections and appositions.

Who, though, are they, tell me, the travelers, these even
a little more fleeting than we ourselves, whom pressing from early on
there wrings them a for whom, for whose sake,
never contented will? But he wrings them
bends them, slings them, swings them,
throws them and catches them back; as though from an oiled,
smoother air they glide down
on to a thread-bare carpet, thinned from their
endless leaping, this carpet
lost in the cosmos,
laid on like a plaster as if the suburbs
of heaven had wounded the earth there.
And hardly there,
upright, there and laid out: the large
initial letter of standing There . . . . , yet even the strongest
men, it rolls them up again as a joke, the ever
approaching grasp, as did Augustus the Strong at table
a platter of pewter.

From Duineser Elegien.

Rilke’s German here is even richer in such sound-play than I could reproduce in English.

As in the case of rhyme and assonance, alliteration graces poetry, much as runs, turns, trills etc. grace music. These musical graces enhance a poem when skillfully and naturally worked in. They might not be essential to poetry, though they are integral to many poems.

The effects of alliteration can vary greatly. Alliteration can enhance the lyricism of a poem, as in Matthew Freeman’s ‘Diana’, where it reinforces the hidden half-rhymes of ‘breast’ and ‘breath’:

No flower has a breast
or beauty like my lover’s hair —
a breath of rose bottled in a cask. —

(The Dogtown poet / Matthew Freeman. Charnwood, A.C.T. : Ginninderra Press, c2006.)

Indeed this lyrical affect of alliteration can even have a similar tone to rhyme, a feeling of rounding and completing what the words are saying, just as Shakespeare frequently rounded off a blank verse speech with a rhyming couplet.

Or it can reinforce a sense of power and toughness, as in John Milton’s lines from Paradise lost, book 1, with its repetition particularly of the rough aspirant ‘h’ and the forward plosives ‘b’, ‘p’ and ‘d’. In Milton’s hands, there is an almost teasing suggestion of the old Germanic heroic lays.

Him the Almighty Power
Hurld headlong flaming from th' Ethereal Skie
With hideous ruine and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire,
Who durst defie th' Omnipotent to Arms.

(1667 version, from University of Virginia’s e-text, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/MilPL67.html)

There is, too, beyond the onomatopoeic use of alliteration, a certain subtle binding element like end-rhyme in Milton’s lines. The adjacent ‘h’ of ‘hurld headlong’ is presaged in the previous line, and echoed in the following line, as is also the repeated ‘d’ of ‘perdition’ and ‘dwell’ by ‘down’ and ‘durst defie”.

b) Few poets have alliterated intensely yet consistently through their poems, while following more modern methods of versification. Gerard Manly Hopkins is a prime example, a virtuoso who has combined alliteration with strictly patterned end rhyme. Hopkins calls his rhythms ‘sprung rhythm’; as he himself points out, this is the natural speech rhythm of the language, a rhythm that varies with the accentuation of the words. Certainly read what he has to say about it in the ‘Author’s preface’ to his Poems (2nd ed. Oxford UP, 1930.)

Hopkins’ typical alliterations fall on adjacent words with an outlier sometimes preceding the alliterated pair but more often echoing it. This echo or presaging of the alliteration can fall in the same line, or a separate line. Thus two lines are linked by the alliteration. One could label his poetic form as accentual alliterative verse (it is so), though it is perhaps best not to, to avoid confusion with the older Germanic verse forms. Hopkins did not write with a regular caesura or pause dividing the his lines into two half-lines, though he did pause some lines, especially where he both stressed and alliterated adjacent syllables. Along with the heavy but varied use of alliteration and of ‘sprung rhythm’, however, Hopkins used verse and stanza forms that were normal in nineteenth century English poetry, including sonnets, and a truncated sonnet he called ‘curtal-sonnets’. The overall effect is very taut. For example, consider these three stanzas from ‘The loss of the Eurydice’.

No Atlantic sqall overwrought her
Or rearing billow of Biscay water:
Home was hard at hand
And the blow bore from land.
And you were a liar, O blue March day.
Bright sun lanced fire in the heavenly bay;
But what black Boreas wrecked her? he
Came equipped, deadly electric,
A beetling baldbright cloud thorough England
Riding: there did storms not mingle? And
Hailropes hustle and grind their
Heavengravel? wolfsnow, worlds of it, wind there?

c) The older alliterative verse forms had a certain terseness of expression, even in longer poems. Since the four-stressed lines fell into two two-stressed half lines, the verse can and does read as though it were written in very short lines. In fact it could be, and often was, written on the page in short lines, so the alliteration can be seen as binding couplets together, as for example, the stanza from the Hávamál quoted in the first of these two essays on alliteration.

47. Ungr var ek forðum,
fór ek einn saman:
þá varð ek villr vega;
auðigr þóttumk,
er ek annan fann;
maðr er manns gaman.

47. Formerly when young
I fared alone;
way-wildered I wandered;
I felt myself rich
as I found another —
man is man's joy.

My point here, however, is that a poem written in short lines progresses by a series of short sharp ideas or images. The poet is constrained by the form and disciplined into writing with great economy, as in this stanza from Goethe’s ‘Song of the spirits over the waters’:

It streams from the high,
steep wall of rock,
that pure jet,
then sprays in lovely
waves of cloud
to the polished rock;
received with ease
it pours in veils
softly soughing
to the deep below.

Goethe’s German is likewise casually alliterated and assonated, though unrhymed in any formal pattern. Such step by step unfolding is a skill well worth cultivating. I find it especially lyrical, though its effects can equally be very dramatic.

Acknowledgments

Poems and translations unacknowledged in the text are my own. The passage from Rilke’s ‘Fifth elegy’ comes from a joint translation done with my late twin brother and revised by myself. The Old Norse quotation from the Hávamál is lifted from the web site of the Poetic Edda at:
http://www.cybersamurai.net/Mythology/nordic_gods/LegendsSagas/Edda/PoeticEdda/Icelandic/Hovamol.htm
My thanks to the University of Virginia Libraries for permission to quote from the 1667 edition of Paradise lost available on their web site, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/MilPL67.html