Topic 3 (session B) - Patterns, Deviations, Style and Meaning > Extended parallelism: literary examples > Task A

Extended parallelism: literary examples

Accessible / Text version of task

Below is the first stanza of the poem. Read each line carefully and then read the commentary on it. In this way you can see how the parallelism builds up in the poem and what effects it has.

Line 1: I can love both fair and brown

Comment
The object of the verb phrase 'can love' has syntactic parallelism within it: two co-ordinated nouns derived from adjectives. This simple form of parallelism leads us to notice, via the 'parallelism rule' that the women referred to are 'opposite' in terms of their complexion. But although they are opposite he can love them both.

Line 2: Her whom abundance melts and her whom want betrays,

Comment
We now get two more co-ordinated noun phrases which are also objects to 'can love' in the first line. In this line, the heads of the noun phrases are the repeated pronoun 'her'. Each 'her' is postmodified by a parallel relative clause containing the contrastive material: women who are attracted to wealthy or poor men.

Line 3: Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays,

Comment
The structure here is the same as the previous line, the opposition this time relating to solitary vs. gregarious women. The overall structure for the sentence is now becoming clear. There is one main subject ('she') and one main verb phrase ('can love'), and this VP has a series of objects, each of which consists of two co-ordinated noun phrases referring to women with opposing qualities.

Line 4: Her whom the country formed, and whom the town,

Comment
Another pair of noun phrases with the opposition being in the syntactically parallel relative clauses: those brought up in the country or the town.

Line 5: Her who believes and her who tries,

Comment
The same sort of parallel structure as before, this time contrasting those who accept things without question and those who test out/think critically about what they are told.

Line 6: Her who still weeps with spongy eyes,
And her who is dry cork and never cries;

Comment
The same relative clause parallel structure appears here too, with the contrast between those who cry and those who do not. But as the reader may, by now, be becoming too used to the pattern of parallelistic opposition, we begin to get some internal variation. This time each of the 'double objects' of 'can love' occupies a whole line, and the relativised structure in the second line actually contains two relative clauses, not one.

Line 7: I can love her, and her, and you and you,

Comment

The structure changes again at this point, creating a further foregrounding effect through internal deviation. A new main clause starts, repeating the subject and verb from the first line of the stanza, but with a new kind of contrastive parallelism. The two co-ordinated noun phrases themselves each contain two co-ordinated noun phrases. The first repeats the third person pronoun seen in the rest of the stanza and the second repeats the second person pronoun 'you' suggesting that the male persona is actually directly addressing a group of women. So this structure is both like, and unlike what we have seen in the first seven lines of the stanza. This, in turn, leads us to infer a somewhat different meaning for this line. It effectively summarises what has been said so far - the speaker can love all kinds of women. But the change to the direct address pronoun also suggests a much more immediate and forceful argument. Until now, because of the use of third person reference, we could have imagined the persona talking directly to the reader, or to a male friend, about his love for women. Now, given that we must be listening in on him directly addressing some particular women, his argument can also be construed as a direct attempt at persuading them to love him.

Line 8: I can love any, so she be not true.

Comment
This is the last line of the stanza, and in this climactic line the parallelism structure breaks more radically, producing extra foregrounding through internal deviation. And this is the line that also has the sting in the stanza's tail. Although the first half of the line closely parallels the first half of the previous line, there is no second co-ordinated noun phrase. Instead we finally get the statement of a 'condition' on his apparently universal love of women - he can love many different kinds of women, but only those who are untrue! This, of course, goes against some strong conventional stereotypes, and this schematic deviation produces more foregrounding. Conventionally people best love those who are true to them, and indeed women are usually portrayed as being more true, less fickle, in their affections than men. This clearly sets up an issue to be resolved in the rest of the poem.

A comment on the rhyme scheme
Note that rhyme is an instance of phonemic parallelism. The rhyme scheme for this stanza is ABBCDDDEE, and the rhymes, particularly the DDD rhyme in the middle of the stanza, reinforce the parallelistic effects we have seen in relation to the grammar. The final couplet also helps to mark the more major meaning changes we have noticed in those last two lines. The first summarising line (line 8) breaks the established DDD pattern and the last line, with its sudden imposition of the 'falsity' condition to the next summary, gets an added ironic twist because of its rhyme parallelism with that previous 'universal' summary line.

If you would like to view the full version of this poem you can do so at the The Literature Network website.

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