Re: Poetry: alliteration

Ed Heil wrote:
> The way you're reading it seems rather singsong; perhaps you are
> reading it too much under the influence of iambic pentameter and
> whatnot and bring to it too strong an expectation of daDUm daDUM
> daDUMs?
Probably the reason.  Nevertheless, in regular speech, I'd probably
still stress like so (initial cap = secondary stress, all cap = main
stress):

Wilt thou Learn the LORE that was Long SECret
of the FIVE that Came from a far COUNtry

Which is pretty close, I suppose.  Reading the Beowulf, I find myself
sliding into a usually-correct stressing pretty easily, but even so,
there's still a few lines that I have to read a few times to figure out
where the stresses should be, and one line I STILL can't figure out:

"since the Creator his exile doomed"

Unless "exile" is stressed on the second syllable.

Wait!  As I was thinking this e-mail over, I realized that vowels are
considered to alliterate, so creAtor and Exile are considered to
alliterate.  Sheesh, took me a couple dozen re-readings to realize it.

--
"Old linguists never die - they just come to voiceless stops." -
anonymous
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