The repetition of identical or similar syntactic patterns in adjacent phrases, clauses, or sentences; the matching patterns are usually doubled, but more extensive iteration is not rare. The core of a p. is syntactic; when syntactic frames are set in equivalence by p., the elements filling those frames are brought into alignment as well, esp. on the lexical level (thus the term “semantic p.”). Meter and rhyme have both been recognized as species of p. on the phonological level. In a formulation of Jakobson, parallel syntax “activates” p. on other linguistic levels. The extreme case of similarity (Jakobsonian equivalence, q.v.) is repetition (q.v.); alternatively, p. can be considered the most significant subtype of repetition.
There is nothing which restricts p. (or the cognate trope in Cl. rhet., isocolon, q.v.) as a grammatical phenomenon to verse, and it is common in certain forms of elevated prose, notably oratory, prayer, and, in Chinese, letter-writing. Further, it is a complex question whether p. is properly a trope (or master trope) or, again, strictly a matter of only grammar or also rhet. and logic. In Jakobson’s later work p. came to hold a place of ever-increasing importance. The variety of grammatical domains over which p. can work is tremendous. A series of examples from Eng. Ren. verse will illustrate some common features of parallelistic usage. The domain may be a phrase: “Light of my life, and life of my desire”; “Oft with true sighes, oft with uncalled teares, / Now with slow words, now with dumbe eloquence” (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella 68, 61).
In the first example, two possessive noun phrases are parallel (as are the components, desire ), while in the second, four temporal phrases are matched. Within the second example, the first two phrases involve repetition as do the second two, though the sequence now has a distinct sense, “alternately.” Thus the line has an internal reading, and another reading suggested by the p. In each case the short item comes first: life (1 syllable), desire (2 syllables); true sighes (2 syllables), uncallèd teares (4 syllables); slow words (2 syllables), dumbe eloquence (4 syllables),
The unit of p. may be simple clauses: “I may, I must, I can, I will, I do …” ( AS 47). Here the parallels are perfect, subject + verb; but greater variety is equally effective: “My mouth doth water, and my breast doth swell, / My tongue doth itch, my thoughts in labour be” ( AS 37). In more complex structures, the individual entities are themselves likely to be more complex:
Let Fortune lay on me her worst disgrace,Let folke orecharg’d with braine against me crie,
Let clouds bedimme my face, breake in mine eye,
Let me no steps but of lost labour trace,
Let all the earth with scorne recount my case.
(AS 64)
The line here is the unit of p.; at the same time, these are lines 3—7 of a sonnet, and as a block they cut across the two opening quatrains.
Complex sentences may show p., e.g. embedded noun clauses and iƒ/then structures:
I saw that teares did in her eyes appeare;I saw that sighes her sweetest lips did part.
If he waite well, I never thence would move:
If he be faire, yet but a dog can be.
In tight p., where the grammatical texture of the parallel entities is identical, it is common to find a reversal of position, as object + adverb here: “I curst thee oft, I pitie now thy case” ( AS 46). This is one variety of the scheme of chiasmus (q.v.).
These examples are drawn from literate poetry, and the great variety displayed in them is in part due to that circumstance. In most poetries exhibiting p., however, the ways in which the scheme is disposed are relatively few. These poetries tend to be either oral or early-literate; the later typological category is important: the poetry of the Heb. Bible began to be written down two and a half millennia ago, while Finnish folk poetry has only been recorded for a century and a half, but cl. Heb. and Finnish poetry are comparably close to the oral poetic situation and comparably far from the literate setting.
P. is well represented in traditional poetry in Chinese (and its literary offspring, Vietnamese), in Toda (but not in the other Dravidian tongues), in the Semitic langs. (in addition to ancient Semitic texts in Heb., Ugaritic, and Akkadian, there are several types of “parallel prose” in Arabic), in the Uralic langs. (incl. Finnish), in the Austronesian langs. (Rotinese is the best known), and in the Mayan langs., both medieval and modern. Rus. folk poetry is parallelistic, as is some Altaic (Mongol and Turkic) verse.
Biblical Heb. is the best know system of p., first described by Bishop Robert Lowth in 1753. In Heb. verse (and related ancient Near Eastern poetries) p. plays a role in structuring the line. Most scholars believe that the verse of the Bible is distinct from its prose, although parallelistic coloring is found in the prose as well (e.g. the fable in Judges 9). J. L. Kugel has argued that there is in fact no real dividing line between prose and verse, but his remains a minority view. He takes the two halves of a parallel unit as having an augmentative relationship: the first element is assertive and the second has the force “not only that, but also this.” Another minority view holds that there is a strictly recoverable metrical component to the poetry of the Heb. Bible (e.g. Eduard Sievers), but it is more generally assumed that there is an unrecoverable or opaque metrical element in the verse.
More recently, scholars have recognized syntactic regularities as structural features of the verse (O’Connor): “He-led the-east-wind out-of-heaven. / He-guided out-of-his-power the-south-wind” (Psalms 78:26). Lowth’s traditional scheme distinguishing three types of biblical parallel verse—”synonymous”, “antithetical”, and “synthetic”—is of only limited usefulness. The example above would be synonymous, based on the notion that the elements led and guided, east-wind and south-wind, and heaven and power can be regarded as synonyms. But the idea of synonymy has been exaggerated in Heb. philology; many 20th-c. trs. of the Bible are seriously marred by a reliance on the false principle of “synonymy.” As the term “synonymous p.” is used, it means that the lines in question refer to (more or less) identical things. This conception can be made to cover a wide range of biblical verse, but there is much left over. Of the rather large latter category, some sets of parallel lines can be taken as “antithetical,” either because they mean the opposite or because they use opposed or antithetical pairs:
In many people is the glory of a king,but without people a prince is ruined.
Slowness to anger is great understanding,
but a hasty temper is an exaltation of folly.
In the first pair of lines the sense of the first line is the opposite of the second, and the range of reference is the same; in the second pair of lines, the opposed pairs anger/ understanding and temper/ folly, are lined up, but the reference is to two quite different types of people. This diversity, combined with the fact that antithetical p. occurs largely in so-called wisdom lit. (notably the Book of Proverbs), makes it suspect as an independent category. Even more suspect is “synthetic p.,” which was the category meant to catch all remaining examples of p.; and some more narrowly defined subtypes have also been proposed to supplement the typology of biblical p. In fact, the traditional scheme originated by Lowth has outlived its value. Rather, p. needs to be approached as a syntactic phenomenon more or less independent of the semantic features that overpower Lowth’s approach.
One particular difficulty posed by Heb. verse is the actual domain of p.: many accounts suggest that the poetry is made up exclusively of parallelistic couplets, but in fact this is true only of wisdom lit.; in other poetic books, esp. those of the prophets, single lines, triplets, and quatrains are common. Thus the practice of some scholars to refer to a single line as a halfline leads to great confusion when it is applied to the bulk of Heb. verse. The line (or colon or stich) can be defined on bases largely distinct from p.
In general, the relationship between the metrical unit and the parallel entity can take on numerous forms. In traditional poetries all (or nearly all) verse discourse may be parallelistic. The basic domain of p. may then be the line (Rotinese, Mayan) or the half-line (Finnish and some other Uralic poetries), or a variable range (Toda). In Chinese verse, largely isosyllabic, with tonal patterning, the rules governing p. vary widely according to genre; ƒu is more loosely parallelistic than the central couplets of lü, shi (”regulated verse”), the most constrained variety of p. known.
In European poetry since the Ren., biblical influence has reinforced the use of p. to the point that few major verse texts are without some p. William Blake and Christopher Smart both use quasi-biblical p. extensively. A decisive break comes with Walt Whitman’s choice of biblical structures to supplant the metrical basis of Eng. prosody itself:
The prairie-grass accepting its own special odor breathing,I demand of it the spiritual corresponding, Demand the most copious and close
companionship of men,
Demand the blades to rise of words,
acts, beings,
Those of the open atmosphere, coarse,
sunlit, fresh, nutritious,
Those that go their own gait, erect,
stepping with freedom and command,
leading, not following,
Those with a never quelled audacity,
those with sweet and lusty flesh
clear of taint, choice and chary of
its love-power,
Those that look carelessly in the faces
of Presidents and governors, as to
say, Who are you?
Those of earth-born passion, simple,
never constrained, never obedient,
Those of inland America.
Nearly as important is Paul Claudel’s use of the verset (explicitly acknowledged as biblical in origin; q.v.) as an avenue between the Fr. alexandrine and the prose-poem mode established by Whitman’s contemporary, Baudelaire. Because romantic, modernist, and esp. postmodern lit. reflects awareness of a world-wide range of poetry, it was unavoidable that various traditional types of p. would be imitated in European lit.: the many modes of Chinese imitation, from Pound and Amy Lowell on, are well known; Longfellow’s Hiawatha (1855) and John Ashbery’s “Finnish Rhapsody” ( April Galleons, 1987) are each narratives in the style of then-current Eng. trs. of the Kalevala.
Whatever the particular ways that p. is disposed in verse discourse, schemes of equivalence, often associated with metaphor, juxtaposition, and near repetition, take on distinctive force in a parallelistic context. Gestures of signification and logic are represented and carried out in ways that often elude linearly based discourse. An important key to understanding p. lies in acknowledging that parallel structures can operate in both prose and verse and over spans from phrase to entire poem.
User Comments Add a comment…