Let me expand upon the brief overview of alliteration in the previous post. In Book IV, lines 778-782, after the many suitors of Penelope, Odysseus' wife, discover that Telemachus, Odysseus' son, has sailed off to find his father, these evil suitors plot to kill Telemachus when his ship returns to Ithaca. After they devise their evil scheme, Homer writes:
"That said, he chose their finest men - a score.
They rushed to their swift ship along the shore.
They drew their black boat to a deeper spot,
then stepped the mast and set the sail and strapped
the oars in leather thongs. Their sturdy squires . . ."
I highlighted all of the initial "s" sounds (there are "s" sounds contained within some words, along with two similar sounding initial "sh" sounds, too). As we all remember, Alliteration is the repetition of the sound of the initial consonant of two or more words in close proximity to each other.
Just as I asked in my youth: "Yeah, and 'Sally sold seashells by the seashore.' So what?" While the Sally example is a good introduction to alliteration, poets utilize such figures of speech not only to add a musical quality to their poetry, but also to add depth and meaning to what they write. We all agree that these suitors are evil. A universal symbol of evil is the snake. And what sound is a snake known to make? That's right, a hissing sound. The repetition of the "s" sound mimicks the hissing of the symbolically evil snake and, thus, reinforces the notion that these suitors are themselves evil. Imagine, all of that from the repetition of a simple sound!
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