Savoring Sagas, Reviling Rhymes

William Safire has proposed that "The Gamaliel," a faux award along the lines of the annual fiction-spoofing Bulwer-Lytton prize, be given to whichever politician proves to be "the most egregious alliterator" in a given year's stump speech.

I've never understood the bad rap that alliteration gets in Modern English. Old English relied heavily on alliteration to great effect, with recurrent initial phonemes forming the frame and livening the pulse of Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and all those other classic Anglo-Saxon texts that still delight us all, young and old, into the wee hours every evening as we bask in the fading flames 'round the homey hearth.

(Of course, there may be some people out there in the world who don't spend their evenings reciting Old English sagas to one another, but if there are, I don't want to know about it.)

Rhyming, on the other hand, a cagey, shifty-versed import from the Romance languages, continues unabated on its silly path through our language, slopping itself onto gooey greeting cards and imprisoning pop songs in centuries-old phonological patterns adopted from medieval French. (Don't get me wrong, though: I'll post about the glories of medieval French another time.)

Point: How many disparate conceits have been ineptly yoked together in song simply because they happen to rhyme? (e.g., Sting's coupling "shake and cough" with "Nabokov.") Another Point: Why is the deft use of similar phonemes at the end of words now more prized than the same phonic effect at the beginning of words?

Most Important Point: Why should the failure to improvise on-the-spot rhymes result in that Most Ignominious of Appellations, viz., "sucker MC"?

I understand that some folks feel that alliteration is a cheap, easy, mostly brainless rhetorical device that, just like rhyme, forces dissimilar words into unhappy marriages based solely on superficial phonological traits, without regard for those words' meanings and nuances. Still, I think that the innumerable "modern" composers of song who unthinkingly write in rhyme out of sheer unexamined habit are at least as deserving of pointed pointing-out by word pundits as are "egregious alliterators."

Any rhetorical device (alliteration, rhyme, synechdoche, metaphor, allusion, pretentious foreignisms, usw.) can be handled badly. But in alliteration, I hear echoes of ancient Angle encampments and long-silent Saxon lullabyes. Don't you?