In this post from June 4, I asked related how the author known as Lewis Carroll had written Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at the urging of the Alice Liddell, the daughter of the famed lexicographer Henry George Liddell. I ended by noting that Alice could be found in the following lines of the poem that appears at the end of Through the Looking-Glass:
A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July –
Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear . . .
Alan Parness correctly noted that “Alice” is spelt in the beginning letters of each line. There can be no doubt that Carroll had Alice Liddell in mind because the poem ends with the following lines:
Lovingly shall nestle near.
In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?
This is technically known as an acrostic, which at various times has been a popular literary device. Edgar Allen Poe even wrote a poem entitled An Acrostic, which spells out the name Elizabeth. (What NFL team is named after one of Poe’s other poems?)
The late Robert S. Thompson of the Second District Court of Appeal is famous for his acrostic jibe at the dissent in People v. Arno, 90 Cal. App. 3d 505 (1979) (see footnote 2).
Although acrostics are often used for low brow humor, they have been used in more serious endeavors. For example, Jewish liturgical poems known as piyyutim (a term derived from the Greek word, ποιητής , or maker) often use the device. Some of the Psalms (e.g., No. 119) are also acrostics. The famous Jewish poet, Yannai, is considered among the first paytanim (authors of piyyutim) to use acrostics in his poetry and many of his lost poems were rediscovered only when the scholar Israel Davidson happened notice Yannai’s name spelt acrostically in a document recovered from the famous Cairo Geniza. Remarkably, Yannai’s name and writings were hiding in plain sight because the document had been published and was widely available to scholars.
