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They had been slowly climbing the mountain road, from which, on either hand, the pasturelands fell away in long, irregular knolls and hollows. The tops were quite barren, but in the little vales, despite the stones, a short grass grew very thick and tenderly green, and groups of kine tinkled their soft bells in a sweet, desultory assonance as they cropped the herbage.
This ornamented prose, elaborated by Greek and Roman rhetoricians, and constantly apparent in the pages of Cicero, heightened its rhythm by various devices of alliteration, assonance, tone-color, cadence, phrase and period. Greek oratory even employed rhyme in highly colored passages, precisely as Miss Amy Lowell uses rhyme in her polyphonic or "many-voiced" prose. Oxford, 1913.
It is clear, I think, that the old instinct which tended to make a division between poetry and prose is being gradually obliterated. The rhythmical structure of poetry, and above all the device of rhyme, is essentially immature and childish: the use by poets of rhythmical beat and verbal assonance is simply the endeavour to captivate what is a primeval and even barbarous instinct.
The poem ends with this motto: Un Hamlet de moins; la race n'en est pas perdue, qu'on se le dise! Which is chilly truth. The artistic beauty of the prose, its haunting assonance, its supple rhythms make this Hamlet impossible save in French.
Alliteration and assonance are the natural ornaments of poetry in a rude age. In Anglo-Saxon literature alliteration is one of the chief ways of distinguishing poetry from prose. But when a strict prosody is formed, it is no longer needed. Thus in almost all civilised poetry, it has been discarded, except as an occasional and appropriate ornament for a special purpose.
The metre in which the epic is chanted resembles, to an English ear, that of Mr. Longfellow's 'Hiawatha' there is assonance rather than rhyme; and a very musical effect is produced by the liquid character of the language, and by the frequent alliterations. This rough outline of the main characteristics of the 'Kalevala' we shall now try to fill up with an abstract of its contents.
Badger much better, "In the name of God, the Pitiful, the Compassionate" whose only fault is not preserving the assonance: and Maracci best, "In nomine Dei miseratoris misericordis." The weals of this world are the ass's meed! Would Nizami were of the ass's breed.
The little one of five, dragged along by his brother who was dragged by Gavroche, turned his head back several times to watch "Porrichinelle" as he went. The ambiguous phrase by means of which Montparnasse had warned Gavroche of the presence of the policeman, contained no other talisman than the assonance dig repeated five or six times in different forms.
The story must be as old as the end of the twelfth century, and must have received its present form in Picardy. It is written, as you see, in alternate snatches of verse and prose. The verse, which was chanted, is not rhymed as a rule, but each laisse, or screed, as in the "Chanson de Roland," runs on the same final assonance, or vowel sound throughout. So much for the form. Who is the author?
The methods of versification change, and, after line 2647, "there are traces of change in the language. The word co, followed by a vowel, hitherto frequent, never again reappears. Up to that point it is elided or not at pleasure.... There is a progressive tendency towards hiatus. After line 1980 the system of assonance changes.
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