Any detailed discussion of alliteration and assonance in Greek must take account of certain general considerations. The most general, I suppose, is the question – if it is worth calling a question – whether alliteration, in particular, existed as a significant possibility in Greek poetry at all. As is well known, alliteration was not formally recognised by the ancient Greek stylisticians, although they did, of course, recognise under various names several of the forms of sound-patterning and sound-repetition of which alliteration is a particular type. Most modern Hellenists have shown the good judgement that they have shown elsewhere – in regard to the ancients’ inattention to epic formulaism, for instance – in declining to interpret such a silence as the voice of authority, and have sensibly allowed their aesthetic faculties rather than dogmatic preconceptions to pronounce on the question of significant existence, although there have been complete sceptics. A few types of marked exploitation of alliteration in Greek will be noted, and this evidence can serve as adequate for an answer, if evidence is still thought necessary.

This chapter explores Hopkins and rhyme: both his views on the subject and his practice as a poet. It considers Hopkins as an artist caught between two conceptions of rhyme that stood in tension with one another. In the first view, rhyme is a metaphor for thinking about questions of cosmic design and coherence, and hence carries philosophical weight, and a religious and ethical charge. In the second, rhyme is aligned with pleasure and beauty, and needs to be disciplined and harnessed if it is not to be decadent or self-indulgent. The chapter considers Hopkins’s observations and pronouncements on the subject of rhyme in his letters and lectures and compares and contrasts them with the evidence of his poems, in which he often breaks his own rules. The chapter argues that Hopkins needed to be in more than one mind about rhyme in order to write the way he did.