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

18.2 Analysing parallelism
Unit 18 Parallelism
Section 4 Poetic form

As a sustained example of parallelism, consider the beginning of An Essay on Man(1733) by Alexander Pope:

Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things

To low ambition, and the pride of kings.

Let us (since life can little more supply

Than just to look about us and to die)

Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man;

A mighty maze! but not without a plan;

A wild, where weeds and flow’rs promiscuous shoot;

Or garden, tempting with forbidden fruit.

Together let us beat this ample field,

Try what the open, what the covert yield;

The latent tracts, the giddy heights explore

Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar;

Eye Nature’s walks, shoot folly as it flies,

And catch the manners living as they rise;

Laugh where we must, be candid where we can;

But vindicate the ways of God to man.

We work out the parallelisms by laying it out again, this time with parallel sections put one above the other where possible. Where there are parallelisms between more distant parts of text, this is also partially reflected in layout but more difficult to see (e.g. between ’leave all meaner things’ and ’expatiate free o’er all this scene of man’). The slashes indicate line boundaries. The text has been divided into four sections, which are internally consistent as regards meaning (see Unit 3, Analysing units of structure). You should be able to analyse any parallelistic text in this way yourself - you do not need any special knowledge (e.g. of grammar), but can do it on the basis of looking at meanings alone. (Tip: if you are doing this yourself on a computer, use a monospaced font such as Courier to control vertical alignments, and avoid using the tabs key.)

(Note: ’expatiate’ means both to wander freely and to write about at length; ’wild’ here is used as a noun; section C describes a hunting practice, beating the field to drive game into view.)

By laying out the poem in this way, we can see clearly some of the ways in which parallelism works:

1 Note the placement of line endings; we often find that a member ends at the end of a line; we also find that two members often share the same line. Thus parallelism varies in how it operates relative to line boundaries, but generally respects or is aware of line boundaries.

2 The parallelisms are generally binary (two members), but ternary parallelisms (three members) have a tendency to come at the ends of the sections we identified (sections B, C and D). These sections were distinguished on the basis of each having a unified meaning, but we can see that there is also a formal cue to the end of the section, using a ternary rather than binary parallelism.

3 There are some chiasms (though not many), most prominently ’low ambition’ and ’the pride of kings’, where we have an AB:BA pattern, if we interpret ’low’ to be opposite to ’kings’.

4 Parallelism is sometimes very obvious and sometimes less so; we might suggest that the whole text has a parallelism involving members that are exhortations or commands: ’leave all meaner things’ finds a parallel in section B, ’(let us) expatiate free o’er all this scene of man’, in section C, ’let us beat this ample field’, and in section D, ’laugh . . . be candid . . . vindicate the ways of God to man’.

5 Parallelism does not necessarily respect syntactic (grammatical) structure. Thus the adjective ’low’ functions as the opposite of the noun ’kings’, and hence different word classes are involved. Also, members are not coherent syntactic units, as in ’Try {what the open:: what the covert} yield’ - these would only be coherent syntactically if they were structured as ’Try {what the open yields :: what the covert yields}’. Parallelism thus largely respects syntactic structure but sometimes violates it.

6 The text is threaded with a semantic field of ’looking’, which involves ’look about us’, ’blindly’, ’sightless’ and ’eye’, and this semantic field crosscuts the parallelisms as a kind of extended parallelism of its own.

7 There are some stereotyped parallelisms, here most clearly the parallelism between the words ’God’ and ’man’, which is very common in English poetry. Implicitly there is also a culture-nature parallelism (also very common elsewhere) in, for example, the {wild :: garden} opposition.

We can sum up the formal operations of parallelism in this text by saying that parallelism is an organizatory principle, which correlates to some extent with other organizatory principles in the text such as lineation and syntactic structure, but which also is in ’counterpoint’ to these. (This was a notion we introduced also in talking about the relation between rhythm and metre in poetry, where there is often a correlation but also the possibility of counterpoint; see Unit 17.) In itself, this formal complexity is part of the goal of the poem, as in much poetry: the display of compositional skill. But the poem also has a meaning; it is an ’essay on man’, and hence the oppositions between man and animals, culture and nature, and God and man, which are generated through the parallelisms, are formal ways in which this essay is composed.