Topic 3 (session B) - Patterns, Deviations, Style and Meaning > Extended parallelism: non-literary examples > Task C

Extended parallelism: non-literary examples

An excerpt from a speech by Martin Luther King

Below there is a written version of part of Martin Luther King's famous 'I have a dream' speech which he made in 1963. Martin Luther King is a renowned American political figure who campaigned for equal rights for black people in the USA, a campaign which eventually led to his assassination. We have lineated the text of the speech to highlight the major parallelisms in it. After the speech we have provided some commentary about it.

If you prefer you can listen to an audio recording of this part of the speech.

Yes I have a dream this afternoon
            that one day this land and the words of Amos will become real
            and justice will roll down like waters
            and righteousness like a mighty stream
I have a dream this evening
            that one day we will recognise the words of Jefferson
                    that all men are created equal
                    that they are endowed by their creator with some inalienable rights
            and among these are life
                                               liberty
                                                  and the pursuit of happiness
I have a dream this afternoon
I have a dream
            that one day every valley shall be exalted
            and every hill and mountain shall be made low
            the rough places will be made plain
            and the crooked places will be made straight
            and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together
I have a dream this afternoon
            that the brotherhood of man will become a reality in this day
            with this faith I will go out and carve a tunnel of hope
                                                    through the mountain of despair
            with this faith I will go out with you and transform dark yesterdays
                                                                             into bright tomorrows
            with this faith we will be able to achieve this new day
                    when all of God's children
                              black men and white men
                              jews and gentiles
                              protestants and catholics
                       will be able to join hands
                    and sing with the negroes in the spiritual of old
free at last free at last
thank God Almighty we're free at last

Commentary

In the modern world, rhetoric, of which parallelism is a part, is often thought to be an illicit thing. You can accuse someone of being rhetorical, and so be critical of him or her. This kind of reputation that rhetoric in general and parallelism in particular have comes from the fact that we often use rhetoric to convince people of unreasonable things. Politicians are famous for it!

But rhetoric can also be used for legitimate, even highly desirable ends. This is how Martin Luther King uses parallelism. Most people have a general instinctive feeling that all people should be treated equally, and few in the modern world would want to argue against this principle. However, even the most liberal and fair-minded people can be guilty of not being even-handed, and those in positions of power can often be seen acting in accordance with prejudice and self-interest rather than with fairness and rationality. The way in which we all tend to regard and treat people who are different from us is often unreasonable, and the history of the treatment of blacks by whites in the USA is a clear example.

In the 'I have a dream' speech Martin Luther King uses an extraordinary mixture of repetition and parallelism to persuade others to change the way in which black people are treated. He is using his experience of a particular tradition of preaching to good effect, both in terms of the quality of the language and the socio-political ends for which he uses it.

Each time he uses the expression 'I have a dream' he follows it by a noun phrase beginning with 'this' and acting in the relevant clause as a time adverbial. That adverbial is then followed by one or more relative clauses postmodifing 'dream', the first of which begins with 'that'. So, after 'I have a dream this afternoon' we get three parallel co-ordinated relative clauses postmodifying 'dream', all of which are things to be wished for by those who believe in equality of treatment. After 'I have a dream this evening' the relative clause referring to Jefferson itself contains two parallel clauses specifying the laudable words of Thomas Jefferson, and the following main clause has three parallel complement noun phrases 'life' 'liberty' and 'the pursuit of happiness'.

We won't analyse the whole extract in detail here, but this pattern of extensive grammatical parallelism and partial lexical repetition to describe different aspects of equality is continued through the rest of this extract. You might like to examine it in more detail (a good place to start would be the series of pairs of noun phrases co-ordinated together by 'and' which are in apposition to 'all of God's children' towards the end of the extract). The overall result, particularly when the rhythm and pronunciation of the spoken version of the speech is added into the mix, is a strong, almost incantatory, plea, full of explicit biblical allusions, for all human beings (and, given the context of the speech, American blacks in particular) to be treated equally.

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