Alliteration is the agreement of consonant sounds, usually the initial consonant of the words in question. In most English poetry it serves to enrich or ornament the language, but it can be more functional, linking lines of poetry together or tightening the sound structure of an individual line. In Old English poetry, alliteration served the purpose of rhyme, connecting the two half lines of the heavily stressed Anglo-Saxon poetic line; this use (which includes vowel alliteration) will be discussed in another unit of this course. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, some poets used alliteration to suggest violence or loud noise. Here, in Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," it simply adds to the texture of the sound:

                                 Look, how a bird lies tangled in a net,
                                 So fasten'd in her arms Adonis lies;
                                 Pure shame and awed resistance made him fret,
                                 Which bred more beauty in his angry eyes:
                                Rain added to a river that is rank
                                 Perforce will force it overflow the bank.

In Swinburne's poetry, alliteration can become an excrescence:

                    From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine

(Yes, Swinburne actually wrote that--not Spiro Agnew.)

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