A bit of a puzzle ... Photograph: Rex
After the serious business of war last week, this time I thought we might try something a little lighter. Back when I was teaching English as a Foreign Language, I regularly got my students to write acrostic poems on their own names as a kind of icebreaker. Even students with elementary English could, with a little help, come up with enough adjectives to describe themselves and create a basic but functional verse:
Brilliant Intelligent Lively Loveable Yellow
OK, so it's better if you don't have a Y in your name.
With more advanced students, I liked to explore more complex possibilities; the language of affection, irony, satire, the natural world and so on were all practised by generating acrostics.
But no matter how complex my students' efforts were, they were never going to get anywhere near matching Boccaccio's L' Amorosa Visione, the poem that surely merits the title of the most ambitious exercise in acrostic versification ever. It consists of a short introductory verse and a long poem in terza rima. The initial letters of the first, third, fifth, seventh and ninth lines of the introductory poem spell out Maria, the name of Boccaccio's lover. And if that isn't enough, the initial letters of all of the triplets in the main poem spell out three additional longish poems, the first of which is also dedicated to Maria. What an effort! The only problem is that, perhaps unsurprisingly, none of the poems are particularly good.
Boccaccio's poem may be the most elaborate acrostic, but it isn't the oldest. That honour may perhaps belong to a 4th century word-square in Latin that was found in Cirencester that has the added bonus of being an acrostic both horizontally and vertically.
One of the earliest acrostic poems in English is Chaucer's ABC poem La Priere De Nostre Dame. The poem is a prayer to Our Lady in 23 stanzas, each of which begins with the appropriate letter of the alphabet, the "missing" letters being J, U and W. It's less complex than Boccaccio's effort, but much more readable.
There are 26 of Sir John Davies' Hymns of Astraea, but they are not alphabetical. The hymns are each 16 lines long, and the initial letters of the lines spell out Elizabetha Regina. Davies was something of an alchemist, and there is reason to believe that he was intending to use some supposed magical property of the acrostic to create an identity between the Virgin Queen and Astraea, the star-maiden and symbol of justice who is identified with the constellations Virgo and Libra.
Probably the two best-known 19th century examples of the form in English are Poe's An Acrostic which, like Davies' poems, is addressed to an Elizabeth, and Lewis Carroll's A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky, from Through the Looking Glass. The initial letters of this poem spell out the full name of the original Alice, Alice Pleasance Liddell. Both are fine examples of what can be done within the limitations of the form.
Of the 20th century acrostic poems I'd like to link to, none apart from the first link in this article seem to be available online, so I'll limit myself to recommending that you look for Morning Meeting by Vernon Scannell, especially if you like hedgehogs.
And now, the challenge this week is, obviously enough, to write an acrostic on any theme of your own choosing. Satire or affection, self-aggrandizement or queen-worship; all these and much more are welcome. Well, I'm sure I don't have to spell it out.
