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The most commonly studied traditions of alliterative verse are those found in the oldest literature of the Germanic languages, where scholars use the term 'alliterative poetry' rather broadly to indicate a tradition which not only shares alliteration as its primary ornament but also certain metrical characteristics. [2]
Alliteration is used in the alliterative verse of Old English poems like Beowulf, Middle English poems like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Old Norse works like the Poetic Edda, and in Old High German, Old Saxon, and Old Irish. [3] It was also used as an ornament to suggest connections between ideas in classical Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit poetry.
Acrostic: a poem in which the first letter of each line spells out a word, name, or phrase when read vertically. Example: “ A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky ” by Lewis Carroll. Concrete (aka pattern): a written poem or verse whose lines are arranged as a shape/visual image, usually of the topic.
The most distinguishing feature of Old English poetry is its alliterative verse style. The Anglo-Latin verse tradition in early medieval England was accompanied by discourses on Latin prosody, which were 'rules' or guidance for writers. The rules of Old English verse are understood only through modern analysis of the extant texts.
Old English metre is the conventional name given to the poetic metre in which English language poetry was composed in the Anglo-Saxon period. The best-known example of poetry composed in this verse form is Beowulf, but the vast majority of Old English poetry belongs to the same tradition.
Essentially, in fornyrðislag and many other forms, Norse poets treated each "half-line" of Germanic alliterative verse as a separate line. The Norse "couplet" is basically a single Germanic line, a pair of half-lines joined by alliteration. Thus, a Norse fornyrðislag stanza of eight lines corresponds to four lines of Old-English alliterative ...
A verse translation of some nine lines from the Old English Battle of Brunanburh, forming part of an essay on "Anglo-Saxon verse" and published together with The Fall of Arthur. Remaining unpublished is an incomplete verse translation of Beowulf of about 600 lines.
Since "x" is pronounced [ks], the phrase Sale SaXa Sonābant "the rocks were resounding with sea water" (Virgil) can also be considered an example of this kind. Alliteration was a prominent feature of Latin literature (in contrast to Greek), especially in poetry in the 3rd to 1st centuries BC, and continued to be used by some writers even in ...