I got some feedback to the effect that yesterday’s installment was a bit confusing, so I’m going to take some extra time to try to lay things out more clearly, kicking the update that I had planned for today to tomorrow, instead.
We’re dealing with two different kinds of acrostic here, graphic and syllabic. The graphic acrostic is tied together by sight, whereas the syllabic acrostic is tied together by sound.
For instance, here’s a graphic acrostic where all three lines begin with the letter I:
I suck.
It’s something everyone agrees on.
If they see me, they say, “That guy? He sucks.”
But note that only one of those three lines begins with a long-I sound. Now, here’s a syllabic acrostic where all three lines begin with the syllable that sounds like “I”":
I suck.
Eyewitnesses agree,
Identifying me as “that guy who sucks.”
One of these lines doesn’t begin with the “I” letter, but all begin with the long-I sound. (The word “aye” would also be acceptable here.)
The reason we’re trying both these methods is that both of them are arguably faithful to Akkadian acrostics. The Akkadian language has syllable-signs, whereas English letters are generally sound-signs and, depending on the context, can represent different sounds—or no sound, in the case of silent letters.
English-language acrostics usually don’t settle for all beginning with the same thing; there’s a sequence of beginnings that make up the acrostic “key.” Here’s a letter-based acrostic using the key ACROSTIC:
A poem
Can be
Real short,
Only
Singing
Two beats,
It is
Complete.
Now, here’s a syllabic acrostic, using the key ac-ro-stic:
A kind of silly song:
Raw verbiage in a throng
Sticks close together, strong.
I’ve taken a couple of liberties with the second type. The syllable “ac” is spread across two words (a kind) and the syllable “stic” is only the beginning of the last line’s first syllable, “sticks.” This degree of flexibility, though, seems necessary when getting syllabic acrostics to work in English. All that really matters is beginning the line with the sounds in the syllable.
The Babylonian Theodicy has a more complex structure than the above: it’s 297 lines, grouped into 27 eleven-line stanzas. The lines within each stanza all have the same beginning, but there’s a stanza-to-stanza progression that follows the key.
Now, you may’ve noticed that I did more than just a simple acrostic in the last two examples, as opposed to the first two. I also threw in some rhyme and meter. (The graphic acrostic has an abcbdefe rhyme scheme, the syllabic one a simple aaa. The graphic is in iambic monometer, the syllabic one in iambic trimeter.)
Despite the development of free verse, rhyme and meter are standard parts of most traditional English poems. Is it possible to impose them on the Babylonian Theodicy—even on its syllabic acrostic version, tougher to make than its graphic one?
Tomorrow, we find out.