Parallelism: literary examples
Task B - our comments
I kissed thee ere I killed thee
This line is often used as an illustrative example by stylisticians because
it is such a par excellence example of parallelism. It is grammatically
parallel because it consists of two clauses which have the same grammatical
structure (subject-verb-object), joined by the subordinating conjunction
'ere'. And it is lexically parallel because some (but not all) of the
words are repeated in similar parts of the two grammatical constructions.
Indeed, apart from the conjunction which joins the two clauses together,
the only words which are not repeated are 'kissed' and killed'.
This parallelism leads us to 'invent' a meaning relationship between
the two verbs, and as quasi-synonymy ('roughly the same meaning') does
not seem to be appropriate, we opt for quasi-antonymy ('roughly opposite
meaning'). For a moment then, as we read this line, Shakespeare rearranges
our dictionary for us: 'kissed' and 'killed' become opposites, something
which we can see when we use terms like 'love' and 'hate' to talk about
the relationship between the activities described. So parallelism has
the power not just to help us infer the meanings of words we don't know
(see the 'lupped' example in Task A), but also to invent new, temporary,
meanings for words in context.
Before we leave 'I kissed thee ere I killed thee' we should also note
that we have not yet pointed out all the ways in which the two halves
of the line are parallel. 'Kissed' and 'killed' are also morphologically
parallel, as they both have past tense endings, phonemically parallel
because of the /ki/ alliteration and assonance at the beginning of each
word and graphologically parallel because of the doubling of the letters
's' and 'l' in the middle of the two words. This is why the line is such
a good teaching example for parallelism - it has parallelism at almost
every linguistic level.
You may think we have gone too far by now. But there is empirical evidence
to suggest that people do pick up on very small linguistic differences
like this when they talk and read, and it is probably no accident that
Shakespeare chose the word 'ere' rather than 'before'. 'Ere' is a palindrome,
note - it is spelled the same both backwards and forwards!
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