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Updated: May 26, 2025
Excess of alliteration is the most obvious feature of Lyly's style. That style has been carefully analyzed by those who are learned in such things. The study is interesting, with its talk of alliteration and transverse alliteration, antithesis, climax, and assonance.
It used to be a piece of good advice to all young writers to avoid alliteration; and the advice was sound, in so far 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 and upon assonance.
He had at first written "born and reared;" but in spite of the fear lest "brought up" should strike the simple Deacons of the Second Baptist Church in Chicago as unfamiliar and far-fetched, he could not resist the assonance. After directing the letter he went upstairs to bed, and his prayers that night were more earnest than they had been of late perhaps because he avoided the dangerous topic.
Like Lucilius, he introduces single Greek words, a practice which Horace wisely rejects, but which is revived in the poetry of the Empire. His poetical ornaments are those of the older writers. Archaism, alliteration, and assonance abound in his pages.
"Play on, baker; but something for convalescence the return of spring, the sweet assonance of memory." "A September air, and a gush of spring," said the baker, trying to crane his long neck through the window. "Ah, there you are, Dauphin! I shall give you a sleep to-night like a balmy eve." He nodded to the tailor. "M'sieu', you shall judge if sentiment be dead.
Both rhyme and assonance were to be found in the early Latin which he had studied deeply, and may be judged from incidental fragments of the popular language never to have wholly disappeared from common use during the classical period. Virgil, in his latest work, as has been noticed, shows a tendency to experiment in combining their use with that of the Graeco-Latin rhythms.
This anxiety for external beauty which you reproach me with is for me a METHOD. When I discover a bad assonance or a repetition in one of my phrases, I am sure that I am floundering in error; by dint of searching, I find the exact expression which was the only one and is, at the same time, the harmonious one. The word is never lacking when one possesses the idea.
This verse was free from assonance and the banalities which it draws into operatic works, but it kept the rhythm and sonorous sound which is far removed from prose. That was the period when there was nothing but praise for Alfred Ernst's gibberish, though that was an insult alike to the French language and the masterpieces he had the temerity to translate.
In the earliest Christian poetry there is a tendency to write by accent rather than by quantity, but that does not say that the hymns have not a quaint Gothic music of their own. This is very noticeable in Sedulius, a poet of the fifth century. His hymn to Christ is not only full of assonance, but of all kinds of rhyme and even double rhymes.
It used to be a piece of good advice to all young writers to avoid alliteration; and the advice was sound, in so far 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 and upon assonance.
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