Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

18.1 Kinds of parallelism
Unit 18 Parallelism
Section 4 Poetic form

Parallelism exists where two close or adjacent sections of the text are similar. The similarity usually involves one or both of structural similarity, where the sentence structures are similar, and lexical similarity, where the words are similar (or opposite) in meaning. The limit case of similarity is exact repetition, but in most cases of parallelism there is partial exact repetition and partial difference:

so in the agonies of Death, in the anguish of that dissolution, in the sorrows of that valediction, in the irreversableness of that transmigration, I shall have a joy which shall no more evaporate than my soul shall evaporate, a joy that shall passe up and put on a more glorious garment above, and be joy superinvested in glory.

(John Donne, ’Sermon at St Paul’s’, 1625)

Here, for example, there is a parallelism between ’in the anguish of that dissolution’ and ’in the sorrows of that valediction’. These two sections of text are structurally similar (as can be seen by the identitical parts: ’in the . . . of that . . .’) and, where they differ, the words are similar in meaning: ’anguish’ and ’sorrows’ on the one hand, and ’dissolution’ and ’valediction’ (saying goodbye) on the other.

Parallelisms can be distinguished by which level of textual material they involve. At the level of narrative structure, we can talk about the parallelism between plots, or a parallelism between characters. The component parts of a narrative include distinct sub-plots, episodes, characters and objects, and all of these types of component can be involved in parallelism. Thus, for example, it is not uncommon for a sub-plot to parallel a main plot (as for example in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream(1596)). A narrative might be in groups of parallel episodes, possibly organized according to some numerical principle such as ’in pairs’ or ’in triplets’ (e.g. three incidents of one kind, followed by three incidents of another). And it is common to have characters in a narrative who are similar at some level of abstract description but who are opposites on the surface; there may be a parallelism between the hero and the villain.

At the level of linguistic structure we can also distinguish kinds of parallelism: ’lexical parallelism’ is a parallelism in meaning, involving words (hence ’lexical’); ’syntactic parallelism’ (parallelism in sentence structure) is a parallelism in form, and is a parallelism between two sections of text that have the same syntactic components; and ’phonological parallelism’ is parallelism involving sounds. There are basically two kinds of phonological parallelism. The most common type of phonological parallelism in English literature involves coherent ’clumps’ of sound such as the end or beginning of a syllable, and is exemplified by rhyme and alliteration (see Unit 16: Rhyme and sound patterning). There is another type of phonological parallelism, which is developed systematically in some literary traditions; this is a parallelism between two longer and disconnected sequences of sounds and could be called soundpattern parallelism. Examples of this are found in the technique of cynghanedd (’harmony’) in Welsh poetry, where a sequence of consonants in the first half of the line is repeated in the second half of the line; the Welsh-born poet Gerard Manley Hopkins adapted this technique in some of his English-language poems.

Most parallelisms have two members (called ’binary parallelisms’), while some have three parts (’ternary parallelisms’) or more. The extract from Hiawatha below is characteristic of the text as a whole in having an extended (here four-part) parallelism. Lines 2 and 3 are two members of a two-part (binary) parallelism; and line 4 contains within it a binary parallelism. Lines 4-8 are members of a four-part parallelism:

Should you ask where Nawadaha

Found these songs so wild and wayward,

Found these legends and traditions,

I should answer, I should tell you,

’In the bird’s-nests of the forest,

In the lodges of the beaver,

In the hoofprint of the bison,

In the eyry of the eagle!’

    (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Song of Hiawatha, 1855)

The words that constitute the members of a parallelism are often different but are usually related in meaning in some way. A pair or larger set of words that belong to the same ’area’ of meaning are said to belong to the same ’semantic field’. A semantic field is a set of words with various kinds of relation to one another, including similarity of meaning (synonymy), part-to-whole relations (a hyponym is a part relative to a whole) and opposition of meaning (antonymy). Where the two meanings are interpreted as in opposition, then we have ’polar parallelism’ (because the words are at opposite poles as far as meaning is concerned). Anther kind of parallelism is non-polar parallelism:

In this example, we have a triple parallelism, where the first two members are in a whole-to-part relation (a year contains a summer), and the next two members are in polar opposition (summer is opposite from winter). Polar parallelisms often draw on pre-existing stereotyped oppositions in the culture, such as the culture versus nature opposition, or man versus woman.

In parallelism, members need not be structured identically. One member of the parallelism can have a ’gap’ called an ’ellipsis’, where the missing word or words can be filled in from context. Thus consider this proverb:

Excellent speech becometh not a fool;

Much less do lying lips a prince.

    (Proverbs, 17, 7)

This can be laid out as follows, to bring out the parallelism:

The second member of the parallelism is missing its verb, but it is easy to complete it as ’become’ (here meaning ’suit’ or ’fit’), so that the second member can be read as ’much less do lying lips become a prince’. Ellipsis can involve the second member of a parallelism, but it can also involve the first member.

A chiasmus (or chiasm) is a syntactic parallelism where the order of parallel elements is reversed. (’Chiasmus’ comes from the Greek ’chi’, which is the name for the Greek letter x, thus symbolizing the crossing over of the parts.)

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,

Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;

    (Thomas Gray, ’Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, 1751)

Here, ’the harvest’ and ’the stubborn glebe’ (mass of earth) are lexically parallel because they both relate to the earth, and ’their sickle’ and ’their furrow’ are lexically parallel because they both relate to the human modification of the earth, but the two parallel pairs are changed in order from line to line, and hence are an example of chiasmus. Note that another ’crossing’ (though not a strict chiasmus) involves ’did . . . yield’, which is parallel to ’has broke’, where the former member is split in the line.