(Gr. “at the tip of the verse”). In an a. the first letter of each line or stanza spells out either the alphabet (an abecedarius, q.v.) or a name—usually of the author or the addressee (a patron, the beloved, a saint)—or the title of the work (e.g. Plautus; Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist). More rarely, the initials spell out a whole sentence—the oldest extant examples, seven Babylonian texts dating from ca. 1000 B.C. , are of this sort (they use the first syllable of each ideogram). By far the most common form is that which reveals, while it purports to conceal, the name of the author, as in the a. Cicero says Ennius wrote, or Villon’s a. to his mother which spells “Villone.” The spelling is usually straightforward but may be in anagram for the sake of concealment. If the medial letter of each line spells out the name, the poem is a mesostich, if the final letter, a telestich; if both initials and finals are used, the poem is a double a. (two of the Babylonian as. are such), if all three, a triple a. Finals may also read from the bottom up. It is significant that recognition of an a. depends on perceiving not the aural rhythms or the sense of the text but its visual shape.
From the forms just enumerated it is but one step to carmina quadrata and the fantastic word-square intexti of Hrabanus Maurus—with a modern analogue in Edward Taylor’s poem to Elizabeth Fitch—and from there but one step more to carmina figurata or true pattern poetry (q.v.), with which as. are commonly found in ancient texts (e.g. the Gr. Anthol.). In the East, as. are found in both Chinese (ring-poems, wherein one can begin reading at any character) and Japanese poetry ( kakushidai and mono no na).
As. are the kind of mannered artifice that will be popular in any Silver Age poetry; they flourished in Alexandria and in the Middle Ages, being written by Boniface, Bede, Fortunatus, Boccaccio, Deschamps, and Marot among many. Commodian has a book of 80 as., the Instructiones; Aldhelm’s De laudibus virginitatis is not only a double a. made out of its first line, but the last line is the first line read backwards, making a box. The longest a. in the world is apparently Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione, which spells out three entire sonnets. In the Ren., Du Bellay excepted the ingenious a. and anagram from his sweeping dismissal of medieval Fr. verseforms. Sir John Davies wrote a posy of 26 as. to Queen Elizabeth ( Hymnes Of Astraea, 1599). The modern disparagement begins as early as Addison ( Spectator, 60), but as. were very popular among the Victorians. In Poe’s valentine poem to Frances Sargent Osgood, her name is spelled by the first letter of the first line, the second letter of the second line, and so on. Outside verse, this process of elevating initials into a “higher” script produces acronyms (snafu, gulag), now very common. In the early Christian church the symbol of the fish is such an acronym: the initials of the five Gr. words in the phrase Jesus-Christ God’s Son Saviour spell out the Gr. word for fish, ichthys.
K. Krumbacher, “Die Acrostichis in der griechischen Kirchenpoesie,” Sitzungsberichte der königlichbayerische Akad. der Wiss., philos.-philol.-hist. Klasse (1904), 551-691; A. Kopp, “Das Akrostichon als kritische Hilfsmittel,” ZDP 32 (1900); H. Le-clercq, “Acrostiche,” Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne, ed. F. Cabrol (1907); E. Graf, “Akros-tichis,” Pauly-Wissowa; Kastner; R. A. Knox, Book of As. (1924); F. Dornseiff, Das Alphabet in Mystik und Magie, 2d ed. (1925); Lote, 2.305; Reallexikon; W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Lit. (1960), eh. 3; R. F. G. Sweet, “A Pair of Double As. in Akkadian,” Orientalia 38 (1969); T. Aug-arde, Oxford Guide to Word Games (1984); Miner et al., pt. 4.
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