Famous acrostic poems

The acrostic has a reputation as a children's exercise, which makes its actual history slightly startling. It appears in scripture, in Roman prophecy, in a Jacobean comedy, at the end of the most famous children's book in English, and, periodically, in official correspondence written by people who had something they could not say out loud.

Here are the ones worth knowing, with links to the full texts where they are in the public domain. This page describes the poems rather than reproducing them; every link goes to a source that can show you the original.

The alphabetic Psalms and Lamentations

The oldest surviving acrostics in wide circulation are Hebrew, and their spine is not a name but the alphabet. Psalm 119 is the most extravagant: twenty-two stanzas, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, eight verses in every stanza, and every verse in a stanza beginning with that stanza's letter. One hundred and seventy-six verses, all of them constrained.

Lamentations runs the same device across four of its five chapters, and the closing portrait of the capable wife at the end of Proverbs is a twenty-two-line alphabetic acrostic. Several other psalms — 25, 34, 37, 111, 112 and 145 among them — use it more quietly.

The purpose is not decoration. An alphabetic poem claims completeness: this grief, this praise, this description, covered from the first letter to the last with nothing omitted. It is also, not incidentally, far easier to memorise and to transmit accurately, because a missing verse leaves a visible hole in the sequence. This is the ancestor of the modern abecedarian, and the reason the form is associated with completeness rather than concealment.

Almost all of this is invisible in English translation, since the alphabet does not survive the journey. Most study Bibles mark the Hebrew letters in the margin of Psalm 119 for exactly that reason.

Cicero and the Sibylline acrostic

In De Divinatione, written around 44 BC, Cicero examines the prophecies attributed to the Sibyl and notes that they are arranged as an acrostic. His conclusion is sceptical and rather modern: verses composed with that much care were not produced in a prophetic frenzy. They were written, deliberately, by somebody sitting down.

It is the earliest well-known instance of an acrostic being read as forensic evidence — the hidden letters proving a human hand — and it establishes the association between acrostics and authorship that runs through the next two thousand years. When a Roman poet hid his name in his opening lines, this is the tradition he was working in.

Ben Jonson's The Alchemist

Jonson prefaced his 1610 comedy with a twelve-line verse “argument” summarising the plot, whose first letters spell THE ALCHEMIST. It is a small piece of showing off in a play entirely about confidence tricks and elaborate deceptions, which makes it read less like an ornament and more like a thesis statement: the whole play is a thing with a hidden mechanism inside it.

Renaissance and early modern writing is full of comparable devices — dedications spelling patrons' names, sonnets concealing lovers' initials — and Boccaccio built one across the capitals of the entire Amorosa visione, an acrostic tens of lines long.

Lewis Carroll's hidden Alice

The best-known acrostic in English closes Through the Looking-Glass (1871). It is a twenty-one-line poem, usually known by its first line, A boat beneath a sunny sky, and the first letters of its lines spell ALICE PLEASANCE LIDDELL — the full name of Alice Liddell, the child to whom Carroll first told the Alice story on a boating trip in July 1862.

What makes it more than a trick is that the poem never mentions her, and never needs to. On the surface it is an elegy for a summer afternoon: the sky pales, the swallows go, the child in the story stays a child while the real one does not. The name in the margin is the only place the poem says who it is actually about, and it says it silently, where a casual reader will not look. It is the clearest demonstration available of what the form can do that no other form can.

You can read the poem at the Poetry Foundation, or in context at the end of the full text of Through the Looking-Glass on Project Gutenberg. Carroll wrote several others, including acrostic dedications to child friends — the habit was lifelong.

Edgar Allan Poe's puzzle valentines

Poe wrote at least three acrostics, and he was constitutionally incapable of doing it the easy way.

The straightforward one is an early untitled poem from around 1829, published long after his death as An Acrostic, whose first letters spell the name of his cousin Elizabeth. Conventional form, conventional album-verse occasion.

The famous ones are stranger. A Valentine (1846) hides the name of the poet Frances Sargent Osgood by a diagonal method: the first letter of the first line, the second letter of the second line, the third of the third, stepping deeper into the text with every line. The poem then spends sixteen lines daring the reader to find it, and closes by predicting they will fail. An Enigma (1848) uses the same device for Sarah Anna Lewis.

Poe was a serious cryptographer — he ran cipher challenges in magazines and wrote an essay on secret writing — and these poems belong as much to that side of his work as to his verse. The full text of A Valentine is public domain and available from the Academy of American Poets, if you would like to try solving it before you look up the answer.

Modern acrostics in public life

The literary acrostic has largely retreated to the classroom, but the concealed acrostic has thrived, because it solves a specific modern problem: how to say something on the record without saying it on the record.

The most-cited example is a 2009 veto message from the Governor of California, in which the first letters of the body text spelled a seven-letter obscenity aimed at the legislature. The governor's office described the coincidence as astronomical bad luck. The odds were, in fact, calculated by several newspapers, and they were not good.

The pattern recurs: resignation letters whose paragraph initials spell a word of protest, corporate memoranda, open letters. It is a small genre with a consistent shape — the visible text scrupulously polite, the margin saying what the writer actually meant — and it is the exact same device Carroll used to name a child he could not name, put to an entirely different purpose.

Where to read them

• Lewis Carroll, A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky — Poetry Foundation.
• Through the Looking-Glass, full text — Project Gutenberg. The acrostic is the final poem.
• Edgar Allan Poe, A Valentine — Academy of American Poets.
• Acrostic, in the glossary of poetic terms — Poetry Foundation.
• Jack Collom and Sheryl Noethe on teaching acrostics — Poetry Foundation, from Poetry Everywhere.