From her fair head her fillet she undight.
And with the sight amazed, forgot his furious force.
There is more alliteration in our modern poets than most readers suspect; and though an immoderate use of this figure makes it degenerate into a mere fantastic puerility, many examples may be quoted where it adds a wonderful force to the expression. For example, in the following lines from Macbeth:—
That shall, to all our days and nights to come,
Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom.
The grandeur of the effect is here powerfully assisted by the repetition of the letter s.
But the fondness of certain rhymesters for this figure was cleverly caricatured by the brothers Horace and James Smith, in their well-known ‘Rejected Addresses’:—
Lo! from Lemnos limping lamely,
Lags the lowly Lord of Fire!