Alliteration (Part II)

Editor's Note:
This is the second installment in a three-part essay. To read the first installment visit this link: Part I.

If alliteration in general is the presence of the same sounds in different words, and alliteration as paronomasia (or wordplay) is the presence of one word in another word, then alliteration as allusion could be defined as the presence of one poem in another poem. In this post, I want to look at instances of alliteration that function as allusion, and, more broadly, I want to explore the association between alliteration and different kinds of verbal presence. By calling attention to the sonic dimension of language, alliteration restores to language its identity as a material entity rather than simply a transparent vessel of meaning. In other words, when a piece of language alliterates, we become aware of it as a kind of presence in, rather than merely a representation of, the world. I will argue that in the elegy in particular, alliteration exacerbates this slippage between representation and presence, between words and the things they name or describe.

Alliteration alludes. Tennyson’s famous evocation of “The moan of doves in immemorial elms, / And murmuring of innumerable bees” is itself a memorial to Keats’s “mid-may’s eldest child / The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, / The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves,” which is in turn haunted by Wordsworth’s “These waters, rolling from their mountain springs / With a soft, inland murmur.” In his notes to The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot glosses the section titled “Death by Water” as an allusion to Ariel’s water-song in The Tempest. The section begins, “Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead / Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell,” recalling the f-alliterations in the first line of Shakespeare’s song: “Full fathom five thy father lies.” The “dead” at the end of Eliot’s line alerts us to the fact that “lies” at the end of Shakespeare’s line is one letter off from “dies.”

Faced with the subject of death, a poet might take recourse to the displacements of allusion, wordplay, or alliteration. Even elegies, tasked with confronting death, will tend to defer this confrontation for as long as possible. Often they do so through a convention of eliding or misnaming their dead subject, wishing to ward off or displace the dead they will eventually have to mourn. Take Walt Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, in which the president goes entirely unnamed, though the first letter of Lincoln’s name recurs insistently in the poem’s alliterative title, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” ringing an echo between symbol and referent. Later, when the poet breaks sprigs of lilac to commemorate the president’s death, that echo resonates alliteratively between Abraham and I break. In addition to Whitman’s encoding of Lincoln into “Lilacs,” one can cite Milton’s re-christening of Edward King as “Lycidas” or Shelley’s mythologizing of Keats as “Adonais.” A form like the elegy or a formal device like alliteration alludes generically as well as locally, so that Whitman’s “Lilacs” alliteratively scrambles not just an immediate subject, Lincoln, but also a generic predecessor, “Lycidas.” (Whitman’s poem is anchored in its source in Milton with less cryptic allusions, as Whitman’s “song of the bleeding throat” learns from Milton’s similarly synesthetic “blind mouth.”)

Elizabeth Bishop’s elegy for her friend and fellow poet Robert Lowell not only engages in this practice of alliterative misnaming but appears to comment on it as well. “North Haven” is identified as an elegy by its dedication, “In memoriam: Robert Lowell,” but Lowell is never named in the text of the poem itself. Revisiting a favorite island for the first time since her friend’s death, Bishop spends most of the poem cataloging the landscape, its flora and fauna, commenting on what has changed and what has, or appears to have, stayed the same: “The islands haven’t shifted since last summer, / even if I like to pretend they have.” The biggest change, of course, is her friend’s death, but in her characteristically slant, sly, understated style, Bishop charts smaller changes first: 

The Goldfinches are back, or others like them,
and the White-throated Sparrow’s five note song,
pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes.
Nature repeats herself, or almost does:
repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.

While the poem goes on talking about whatever it is ostensibly talking about (goldfinches and sparrows), Bishop’s true subject slips in through minute adjustments. Between “the Goldfinches are back” and “or others like them,” between “Nature repeats herself” and “or almost does,” stretches a gap as wide as death: this is not exactly the same group of birds as last year, presumably because some of the birds have died, replaced by others. Here Bishop is correcting a poetic convention about the cyclicality of nature versus human mortality—a convention exemplified in her own observation, in the previous stanza, that the flowers have “returned” to the island. They haven’t: other, new “Buttercups,” other, new “Daisies” have come to replace the ones that died last year. Here, death is the one-syllable difference between “repeat” and “revise,” or “return” and “revise.”

Bishop, of course, is writing about more than fowl or flower. The word repeat itself repeats Robert, or “almost does:” The two words share almost the same consonants in almost the same order, both bounded by an initial “r” and a final “t.” As for the middle consonant, b and p are both bilabial plosives, one voiced, the other unvoiced. It feels particularly moving that in the change from Robert to repeat, the mourned subject—a poet—has lost precisely the quality that, in phonetics, is called “voice,” referring to the vibration of the vocal cords made when producing certain sounds (b is the voiced version of p, d is the voiced version of t, v is the voiced version of f, and so on). Lowell can no longer “repeat” or “revise” his poems: he is dead, his voice is gone. The poem ends with Bishop herself pointing out this connection between death and the impossibility of exact repetition or further revision: 

[…] You can’t derange, or re-arrange, 
your poems again. (But the Sparrows can their song.)
The words won’t change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.

By repeating certain sounds and revising others to link similar but disparate words, alliteration always evokes the question of presence and absence: what stays the same, what is left behind. This question is foregrounded in the elegy, a poem mourning the absence of a particular person. Perhaps the material presence realized by alliteration, and by its guises as paronomasia and allusion, is compensation for just this, the wished-for presence of a person now forever absent. In summoning one word in another word, in summoning one poem in another poem, alliteration can function as a fantasy of return even as it acknowledges its impossibility:

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

In these opening lines from W. H. Auden’s elegy commemorating the death of fellow poet William Butler Yeats, the various “metaphorical” deaths the poem begins with (“in the dead of winter,” “dying day”) amount to a gesture of deferral (if not denial), an evasion or at least understatement of the fact of Yeats’s literal death, until this fact irrupts at the end of the stanza into the alliterative line which will become the poem’s refrain: “The day of his death was a dark cold day.” Again, the alliterative chain runs not just within but between poems. Auden used a similarly darkly-themed alliterative cluster on d in his translation of the Old English poem “Wanderer,” from the gloomy first line: “Doom is dark and deeper than any sea dingle,” to the brighter last line—“Lucky with day approaching, with leaning dawn”—mirroring the prayed-for circular voyage of the wanderer: that he may return home just as the alliterative letter d returns at the end of the poem. 

In the “Wanderer,” this identification between words and persons remains putative, wished-for rather than realized. The wanderer, at the end of the poem, is still absent.