alliteration

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In poetry and prose, the use, within a line or phrase, of words beginning with the same sound, as in Two tired toads trotting to Tewkesbury. It was a common device in Old English literature, and its use survives in many traditional phrases, such as dead as a doornail and pretty as a picture. Alliteration is used in modern poetry more sparingly than in Old English, as an emphasis for certain imagery or words. While alliteration focuses on repetition of consonants, assonance is repetition upon vowel sounds.

Alliteration was a basic principle of early Germanic poetry, and provides the structure of verse in Old English, Old Saxon, Old High and Low German, and Old Norse, being used without rhyme. The scheme was to divide each line into two, with a caesura between. Each line would have three or four stressed syllables beginning with the same consonant; two of these would be in the first half of the line; and one or two in the second. Alliteration gradually began to disappear as the basic structure for poetry when rhyme was introduced from Latin hymns. In Icelandic poetry, however, it remains a basic poetic principle.

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