Alliteration’s Apt and Artful Aim
“It used to be a piece of good advice to all young writers to avoid alliteration; and the advice was sound, in as much as it prevented daubing. None the less for that, was it abominable nonsense, and the mere raving of those blindest of the blind who will not see. The beauty of the contents of a phrase, or of a sentence, depends implicitly upon alliteration.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson, “On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature” (1905)
When the first English poetry was given by the gift and grace of God it was imparted to an illiterate shepherd named Cædmon and the register that it was received and was alliterative. In the seventh century, the English, as they had yet to be called, may have had Christianity, but they did not yet have poetry. Pope Gregory I, having seen a group of them sold as slaves in the markets of Rome, had said “They are not Angles, but angels,” and yet these seraphim did not sing (yet). There among his sheep at the Abbey of Whitby in the rolling Northumbrian countryside, Cædmon served a clergy whose prayers were in a vernacular not their own, among a people of no letters. A lay brother, Cædmon feasted and drank with his fellow monks one evening when they all took to reciting verse from memory (as one does), playing their harps as King David had in the manner of the bards of the Britons, the scops of the Saxons, the Makers of song–for long before poetry was written it should be plucked and sung.
In his , described how the monks were “sometimes at entertainments” and that it was “agreed for the sake of mirth that all present should sing in their turn.” But in a scene whose face-burning embarrassment still resonates a millennium-and-a-half later, Bede explained that when Cædmon “saw the instrument come towards him, he rose up from the table and returned home.” Pity the simple monk whom in described as a “local herdsman [who] wanted to be a poet though he had not composed anything.” An original composition would wait for that night. Cædmon went to sleep among his mute animals, but in the morning he arose with the fiery tongue of an angel. Bede records that in those nocturnal reveries “someone” came to Cædmon asking the herdsman to sing of “the beginning of created things.” Like his older contemporary, the prophet , some angelic visitor had brought to Cædmon the exquisite perfection of and with a commission most
’s French translation of Carrol’s poem begins, “Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux / Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave”; ’s Spanish starts, “Era la asarvesperia y los flexilimosos toves / giroscopiaban taledrando en el vade”; and my personal favorite, the German of ’s first stanza, reads as “Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven / Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben; / Und aller-mümsige Burggoven / Die mohmen Räth’ ausgraben.” What all translations accomplish is a sense of the sounds of a language, the aural soul that I speak of. You need not be fluent to identify a language’s aural soul; unfamiliarity with the actual literal meanings of a language might arguably make it easier for a listener to detect those distinct features that define a dialect. Listen to a YouTube video of the prodigious, late comedic genius , a master of “double-talk,” who while working in his father’s Yonkers restaurant overheard speakers of “Italian, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, French, Spanish, Lithuanian, and even Bulgarian” and subsequently learned that he could adeptly parrot the cadence and aural sense of those and other languages.