A Linguistic Analysis of Parallelism in Marianne Moore's Poems ( Nevertheless, A Face, What are Years?)

Abstract

Parallelism is one of the devices used to create a cohesivelink. It is a common Phenomenon in English used tocreate consistency in the arrangement of parallel lines andto create beautiful structural patterns with some musicaleffect. It is a stylistic device of repetition and a separatesystem of parallelism, or rhyming of ideas rather thansounds. The remarkable degree of overlap of form andcontent ensures a remarkable degree of accuracy, ortransfer of meaning (Aproberts;1977.1 )The present paper deals with the problem of how parallelstructures tie a poem and make it cohesive and whyMoore uses parallelism and which type is the mostimportant one and why she concentrates upon it?Three poems written by Marianne Moore have beenselected with the aim of investigating the use ofparallelism and revealing how parallelism affects thecohesion of these poems, and the role parallelism plays inmodern poetry use that makes cohesive poems bothsemantically and syntactically .The paper concludes that parallelism is a figure ofbalance identified by similarity in the syntactic structure.Moore focused on syntactic parallelism more thansemantic one .They both complete each other.Throughout the analysis of these three poems, it has beennoticed that Marianne Moore uses grammaticalparallelism in both syntactic and morphological levels aswell as semantic and phonological levels.Furthermore, it has been noticed that the syntheticparallelism is used more than antithetical andsynonymous parallelism i.e parallelism is seen here as acategory of persuasive strategies.