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The usual type of Anglo-Saxon poetry has two alliterations in the first half of the line and one in the second. The lines vary considerably in the number of syllables. The line from Beowulf quoted just above has nine syllables. The following line from the same poem has eleven: "Flota f=amig-heals, fugle gel=icost." The floater foamy-necked, to a fowl most like.
If any one doubts the effectiveness of the unobvious alliterations here insisted on, let him read "jungle" for "desert," "maybe" for "perhaps," "tortured" for "mangled," "blown" for "thrown," and he will become sensible of the lack of the metrical support which the existing consonants give one another.
The comparative scarcity of polemical athletes and the relative plenty of the Miss Susie Goldrick kind of teachers, apparently called into being the Berean Lesson Leaf system, with its Bible cut up into lady-bites of ten or twelve verses, its Golden Topics, Golden Texts, its apt alliterations, like: S AMUEL EEKS AUL ORROWING
It is in the power of any man to rush abruptly upon his subject that has read the ballad of "Johnny Armstrong," "Is there ever a man in all Scotland ?" The initial resemblances or alliterations, "ruin, ruthless," "helm or hauberk," are below the grandeur of a poem that endeavours at sublimity.
Well, even as there are rhymes for the eye, so you will find that there are assonances and alliterations; that where an author is running the open A, deceived by the eye and our strange English spelling, he will often show a tenderness for the flat A; and that where he is running a particular consonant, he will not improbably rejoice to write it down even when it is mute or bears a different value.
Instead of an awkward silence, broken by attempts at wit or dull commonplaces, mine is that undisturbed silence of the heart which alone is perfect eloquence. No one likes puns, alliterations, antitheses, arguments, and analysis better than I do; but I sometimes had rather be without them. "Leave, oh, leave me to my repose!"
I will not shock the delicacy of my fair readers by repeating all the vulgar alliterations with which my novitiate was greeted, as I passed in review before the ladies of North Corner, who met me in Fore Street. Unsophisticated as I then was, in many points, and certainly in this, I thought them extremely ill-bred.
Our hypercritics are not thinking of these little fantoccini beings That strut and fret their hour upon the stage but of tall phantoms of words, abstractions, genera and species, sweeping clauses, periods that unite the Poles, forced alliterations, astounding antitheses And on their pens Fustian sits plumed. If they describe kings and queens, it is an Eastern pageant.
If you are not satisfied with these simple ways of not succeeding, please try the Grosvenor Gallery style. Here the great point is to make the rhyme arrive at the end of a very long word, you should also be free with your alliterations. When the sombre night is dumb, Hushed the loud chrysanthemum, Sister, sleep! Sleep, the lissom lily saith, Sleep, the poplar whispereth, Soft and deep!
Examination shows that the rhythm comes from the alliterations "failed to fill" and "criticism had created," and the disturbance arises from the interjection between them of the word "destructive." Destructive is a good word here, but not essential to the sense and not worth the interruption it makes in the smoothness of the sentence. So it had to go.
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