Apt alliteration’s artful aid.

The line is a self-referential flourish: it demonstrates alliteration while praising alliteration’s usefulness (“artful aid”). Read as a metapoetic aside, it suggests that patterned initial sounds can serve as a rhetorical tool—helping verse become more memorable, pointed, or satirically sharp. Because the phrase is itself densely alliterative, it also invites a slightly ironic reading: the technique can be an “aid,” but it can also become a showy mannerism when overused. In that sense, the line can be taken both as endorsement and as a wink at poetic virtuosity.