Thus evidently, alliteration is the easiest of all verse ornaments, wherefore the amateur poet should be on his guard against its excessive use. Too much of it gives a slippery quality to the verse-the ear is pleased, but finally teased, by the recurring sound, and the mind lets the idea slide by inattentively. As Browning asks, "Do roses stick like burrs?"

But alliteration also has its merits, and Swinburne, a skillful poet, has used the device with beautiful effect, as:

Before the beginning of years,

There came to the making of man.

Sometimes, however, he adopts it less happily:

The lilies and languors of virtue

The roses and raptures of vice.

Here, we feel that the words were chosen mainly for the sake of their alliterative quality, and the mind unconsciously resents the fact; and really this charge of artificiality is the gravest reason against its frequest use. In other words, moderate alliteration intensifies the meaning, as in Kipling's "The Ballad of East and West:"

"You have taken the one from a foe," said he,
"Will you take the mate from a friend?"

Upon the other hand, excessive alliteration weakens the meaning, as in the foregoing second Swinburne example, and gives a feeling of triviality-a sense of mere word jugglery.

The repetition of the same idea, or the same word or phrase, is a legitimate and often a more effective kind of verse-ornament than alliteration, and one much in use among primitive peoples. Note this translation of an old Russian song on the death of Ivan the Terrible:

It happened to us

In Holy Russia,

In stone-built Moscow

In the golden Kremlin,

They beat upon the great bell.

Some further reference to this subject will be found under the treatment of The Ballad.

EXERCISES FOR CLASS USE AND SELF-INSTRUCTION

I. How does assonance differ from imperfect, rhyme? 2. Give three original examples of assonance, using words of different vowel sounds.

3. Write a verse using as many assonant words as seems desirable.

4. Alter several of your former verses by the introduction of assonant words.

5. Discuss briefly the effect of too many assonant words in one poem.

6. What effect has alliteration upon a line, apart from its sound?

7. Turn a passage of figurative prose into simple alliterative verse.

8. Why should a poet guard against the too frequent use of alliteration?

9. Try to find examples (a) of its good use; (b) of its imperfect use.

10. (a) Write a quatrain containing as many alliterative words as possible. (b) Correct it by taking out all alliterative words, except those that are so well used that a change would mar the verse.

II. Do the same for a second stanza.

CHAPTER IX

ONOMATOPOEIA

SOUND AND MOVEMENT

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,
The sound must seem an echo of the sense.
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,

The hoarse rough verse should like the torrent roar;
When Ajax strives some rock's vast might to throw,
The line, too, labors, and the words move slow.

Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,

Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main. -ALEXANDER POPE, Essay on Criticism.

1. Sound

Onomatopoeia is the use of words expressive of natural sounds—it is fitting the sound to the meaning. Primitive man used imitative sounds to describe certain objects. The Indian name Minnehaha, Laughing Water, is a familiar illustration. The original roots of some of our common words arose in the effort of our remote ancestors to describe sound and motion. The word horse, for instance is hrse, or the sound made by a swiftly passing animal.

In English we have many words descriptive simply of sound, such as buzz, hiss, murmur, and clang. We have other words descriptive merely of motion, such as hover and waver. By descriptive, here, we mean that the sound of the word indicates the motion expressed.

We have still a third class of words descriptive of both sound and motion, such as tramp, gallop and plunge.

You see what a mine of rich materials such words are for the poet, and the masters of language have ever been quick to delve for and use them.

Let us now consider gallop as an example of a word which describes both sound and motion. This word does not trot; it gives us both the movement and the thud of the more spirited gait. Canter gives the same motion, but without the blow at the end.

Repeat aloud the word plunge. Do you not hear the sound of the fall of a heavy body in water, with its partial resurge to the surface?

Study the following line from Tennyson:

The white, cold, heavy-plunging foam.

-A Dream of Fair Women.

Notice the effect of the long o's in this line. Why is it such an excellent description of the ocean?

Think of the sound of a retreating wave on a pebbly shore or shingle, and then compare it with Tennyson's line: The scream of a maddened beach dragged

down by the waves,

and with this passage from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach:"