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Symmetrical alliteration is a specialized form of alliteration which demonstrates parallelism or chiasmus. In symmetrical alliteration with chiasmus, the phrase must have a pair of outside end words both starting with the same sound, and pairs of outside words also starting with matching sounds as one moves progressively closer to the centre.
The Old English epic poem Beowulf is written in alliterative verse.. In prosody, alliterative verse is a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principal device to indicate the underlying metrical structure, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. [1]
Alliteration and assonance played a key role in structuring early Germanic, Norse and Old English forms of poetry. The alliterative patterns of early Germanic poetry interweave meter and alliteration as a key part of their structure, so that the metrical pattern determines when the listener expects instances of alliteration to occur.
Alliteration is a special case of consonance where the repeated consonant sound is at the stressed syllable, [2] as in "few flocked to the fight" or "around the rugged rock the ragged rascal ran". Alliteration is usually distinguished from other types of consonance in poetic analysis and has different uses and effects.
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.
Old English poetry alliterates, meaning that a sound is repeated throughout a line, generally taken from the first syllable of the first stressed word in a line. Alliteration is based on sound rather than letter.
The earliest Latin poems, unlike early Germanic and English poetry, do not have obligatory alliteration. Most of the fragments of the early accentual Saturnian poetry listed by Lindsay exhibit no alliteration, although some do, for example the following line, attributed to Naevius (c.270–c.201 BC), which has alliteration of M, P, and T:
The rules by which alliterative verse was composed in Middle English are unclear and have been the subject of much debate. No metrical rules were written down at the time, and their details were quickly forgotten once the form died out: Robert Crowley, in his 1550 printing of Piers Plowman, simply stated that each line had "thre wordes at the least [...] whiche beginne with some one letter ...