University-Erbil Scientific Journal Special Issue No.
1, August 2018
Congruence of Foregrounding in Philip Larkin's 'Wants'
(A Stylistic Study)
Wirya Ahmed Ameen
English Department
College of Languages, Salahaddin University-Erbil
wiryagm67@gmail.com
Abstract
There is no doubt that the true usefulness of the study of style (Stylistics) lies in
an effort to demonstrate the relevance of significant description to interpretation. It
concentrates on identification and description of formal and structural features of a given
text, and the role of these features within the universe of discourse. The present work is
an attempt to practically manifest the role of stylistic method to literature, and how it
plays a vital role in helping the reader to arrive at two important aspects of the study of
literature, its understanding and enjoyment. To accomplish this, stylistics makes use of
the principles and methodologies drawn from linguistics to arrive at the effect the writer
wishes to communicate to the reader. This paper deals with the analysis of Larking's
'Wants' so as to show to what extent the writer makes use of specific language structures
in an attempt to convey his message to the reader.
To tackle this research point, the paper is divided into four sections: section one
is introductory, it sheds light on the role of stylistics in exploring the significant link
between linguistic form and function, and also gives an account of the writer's biography.
Section two presents stylistics as the interdiscipline that gathers different linguistic and
literary issues together and shows their interrelatedness. Section three is concerned with
foregrounding as a stylistic device that operates effectively in carrying a writer's
viewpoint to his readers. It gives an account of this general principle with reference to its
types as well as other related terms that usually co-occur with it. Section four, which is
the core of the study, tackles the congruence of foregrounding found in the poem under
study, and, in a separate section, discusses the significance of each foregrounded part and
the role it has in conveying the general idea of the poem. This section consequently
exhibits how different aspects of linguistic form may coincide to fulfill an artistic function
of language. The paper ends with the statement of conclusion and a list of the references
utilized.
Keywords: Stylistics, Foregrounding, Linguistic, Literary
DOI: 10.24086/cuesj.si.2018.n1a2
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1. Introduction:
Every time a literary writer uses language, he/she necessarily adopts a style of
some sort and makes a selection from a range of syntactic and lexical possibilities
according to the purpose of communication. This entails that readers of literary works are
unlikely to grasp the content of a poem or any other literary genre without considering its
linguistic and structural form. And this is the task of stylistics which provides as detailed
a description as possible of the work in question in order to deepen the process of
interpretation and consequently deepen the readers' understanding of the text. The value
of such stylistic analysis is to show the communicative link between form and function,
and thus be of service to the needs of language learners. To demonstrate this role of
stylistic analysis, the present work handles the analysis of a poem, rather than any other
literary genre, as it is maintained that the more simple and basic concepts in stylistic
analyses were first used in poems.
The poem to be analysed in this work is entitled ' Wants' by Philip Larkin. The
paper points out some of the significant stylistic features in the text, and then shows how
such formal stylistic features give rise to the poem's meaning and effect.
Philip Larkin, the poet, was born on August 9, 1922, in Coventry, England. He
attended St. John’s College, Oxford. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was
published in 1945. In 1946, he discovered the poetry of Thomas Hardy and became a
great admirer of his poetry, learning from Hardy how to make the commonplace and often
details of his life the basis for his poems. Later, Larkin became the prominent poet of his
generation, and a leading voice of what came to be called “The Movement," group who
rejected the prevailing neo-Romantic fashion of writing and focused on intense personal
emotion. He is known for his dark vision and underlying obsession with universal themes
of mortality, love, and human solitude. As an anti-social and a great lover he never
married and worked as a librarian in the provincial city of Hull, where he died on
December 2, 1985.
The following is the text of his poem 'Wants':
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with inviting-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff-
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Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death-
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
There are several techniques adopted by stylisticians in their analysis of a given
poem. Some of those techniques involve the investigations of aspects such as: the
overall structure of the poem, lexical collocation, syntactic deviation, punctuation,
phonology, coordination, ellipsis, repetition, parallelism, orthographic deviation, and so
on. This research aims at analyzing the poem in the light of lexical, phonological,
syntactic and semantic deviations from the standard norm of the language.
2. Stylistics as an Interdiscipline:
The interdisciplinary nature of stylistics has been maintained by different linguists
and stylsticians. Widdowson (1975: 53) sees stylistics not as a subject in its own but as
the link between two disciplines: linguistics and literary criticism. He represents this
mediating role of stylistics via a diagram:
Linguistics Literary Criticism
Stylistics
Language Literature
The above diagram illustrates that one may start from either language or literature
and, passing through stylistics, move toward either linguistics or literary criticism.
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Leech (2008: 2) also reiterates this fact about stylistics and calls it 'a bridge
discipline'. To him stylistics acts as a bridge between linguistics and literary studies, and
he observes that, in spite of the revolutionary developments in linguistics and literary
theory, the essential role and formulation of stylistics, as a discipline bridging the gap
between the two, remain valid. In this way he demonstrates the interrelation between
linguistic description and literary interpretation, and to him this interface is the sphere of
stylistics.
This eclectic merit of stylistics is also evidenced by Niazi and Gautam (20007: 6)
who believe that stylistics draws much of its analytic power from the methods of
linguistics; but on the other hand, it draws much upon the interpretative goals of modern
literary criticism.
Other examples of attempts by linguists to show the interface between linguistics
and literature, which prove the interdisciplinary characteristic of stylistics, involve that of
Sell (1991: xii) who initiated the idea of literary pragmatics. He emphasized the
relationship between language use and literary context. He saw the entire processes of
production and reception as specific to particular socio-cultural, situational, and
interactional circumstances. He declares that linguistic well-formedness is neither a
sufficient nor a necessary condition of interpretability, i.e. it is almost easy to fabricate
texts which satisfy all linguistic requirements, but still fail to make sense; and ,
conversely, it is possible to have texts which make perfect sense though they lack overt
links between the sentences. This implies that interpretability is something different from
linguistic well-formedness and must be explained via an apparatus which intermingles
linguistics and literature, and that is the area of stylistics.
3. Foregrounding as a Stylistic Device:
It is no longer doubtful that linguistic theory can add a lot to our comprehension
of literature. What literature is, how it works, and why it is there at all, are some of the
questions that the theory of linguistics tries to provide answers to. Linguistics as a
discipline has contributed a significant body of concepts and strategies to literary criticism
(Finch 2000: 192). In so doing, the practical importance of linguistics tends to be
measurable in terms of the applicability of its techniques to point out some outstanding
features that can be ascribed to the literary text. Such features might be missed if we are
not equipped enough with an awareness of how the language works (Jacobson, 1960:
350).
The concept of foregrounding is said to be one of those significant concepts that
linguistics has contributed to literary criticism. This notion is developed from the works
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of the Czech formalist Mukarovsky. To him, the main purpose of art is to make people
see the world in a new way through making strange. This means that the notion of
foregrounding is achieved by highlighting or making prominent, particular textual
features; and this consequently entails breaking the norms of the standard language with
the result that one characteristic of literariness is regarded as a degree of linguistic
foregrounding (Finch 2005, 190). According to Leech and Short (1981, 28),
foregrounding is referred to as a stylistic strategy that is closely associated with a specific
type of aesthetic exploitation of language that:
"takes the form of surprising a reader into
a fresh awareness of, and sensitivity to, the linguistic
medium which is normally taken for granted as an
'automatized' background of communication"
The concept of foregrounding is thus identified as being a stylistic strategy that
refers to 'a form of textual patterning which is motivated specifically for literary aesthetic
purposes' (Simpson, 2004:50); though multiple senses are attributed to this concept by
psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists who treat the phenomenon from different
perspectives (Cook,1995:153). The value of this concept in textual analyses is backed up
by Hakemulder (2004:38) who maintains that the notion of foregrounding has been made
use of in textual analyses as a tool to describe particular characteristics of the text, or to
explain its specific poetic effects on the reader. Thus, the textual representation involves
new information conveyed via textual features- and this is called the foreground- in
contrast to those other features which are linguistically normal, called the background
(Short, 1996:12).
3.1 Foregrounding and Other Related Terms:
The term foregrounding is collocated or interchanged with some other
terminologies that roughly give the same idea. Suggested terms such as defamiliarization,
deautomatization, deviation, and poetic function are frequently used by different writers
all converging at one point: to what extent does a writer breaks the norms of the standard
language for fulfilling certain literary purposes?. Shklovsky (1965, 9) saw foregrounding
in the form of defamiliarization, as accompanied by feeling: he noted, more precisely,
that stylistic devices in literary texts "emphasize the emotional effect of an expression".
Mukarovsky (1964: 19) concurrently used this term interchangeably with
deautomatization, i.e. preventing automatization by making strange. Deviation is also one
of the terms found along with foregrounding. It is identified as a stylistic device that is
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utilized by writers as a strategy to establish a hierarchy of meanings and themes in the
text, bringing some to the fore and shifting others to the background. It is considered as
the core of reader-centered stylistics as it provides a theory of analysis with the help of
which a reader develops the habits necessary for active and independent reading (Niazi
and Gautam 2007, 7).
3.2 Foregrounding and Interpretation:
It is a very general principle of artistic communication that a work of art in some
way deviates from norms which we, as members of society, have always leant to expect
in the medium used. This phenomenon applies to any form of art whether it is a piece of
music, a painting or a poem. A painting that is representational does not simply reproduce
the visual stimuli existing in the mind of the observer, but it usually deviates from
photographic accuracy to show some artistic interest. In music there are expected patterns
of melody, rhythm, and harmony; and a composer's skill lies not in mechanically
reproducing these, but in introducing unexpected departures from them. These deviations
from the standard norm constitute what we call foregrounding. The same is largely
applicable to literature and especially to poetry. The foregrounded figure is the linguistic
deviation, and the background is the language. Readers of poetry pick out the linguistic
deviation in a phrase like 'a grief ago' as the most arresting and significant part of the
message, and interpret it by measuring it against the background of the expected pattern.
Deliberate linguistic foregrounding is not confined to literary genres, but is also found for
example in joking speech and children's games. Literature is distinguished, as the Czech
scholar Mukarovsky says, by the consistency and systematic character of foregrounding
(Leech, 1969: 57).
The foregoing discussion maintains that poetic foregrounding presupposes some
motivation on the part of the writer and some explanation on the part of the reader.
Considering these two aspects help the reader arrive at the right or at least close
interpretation of a given piece of literary work. A question like 'what is the point?' often
accompanies each foregrounded feature. And only those linguistic deviations are
artistically significant that:
a. communicate something
b. communicate what were intended by their authors
c. are judged by readers to be significant
(Leech, 1969: 59f)
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3.3 Types of Foregrounding (Deviation):
Since language is not a haphazard mass of sounds and symbols but is instead an
intricate web of levels, layers, and links (Simpson, 2004: 5); the deviant linguistic features
displayed throughout Larkin's 'wants' are identified across a number of interrelated levels
of linguistic description. However, some levels of linguistic deviation, such as discoursal
and dialectal levels, have been neglected in this paper as there is still a heated debate
concerning the validity of these levels.
Foregrounding as a stylistic device is said to have been realized in different levels
of language. Some of these levels are mentioned by Leech (1969: 42ff):
1. Lexical foregrounding
The invention of new words (neologism) is the more obvious ways in which a
poet may exceed the norm of the language. This process is not regarded as a violation of
the lexical rule of the language, but it is a rule applied with greater generality than is
customary. For example, the prefix 'fore-', in words like 'foretell' and 'foresee', can be
used by poets to produce strange vocabularies such as 'foresell' or 'foreappear'. Also the
repetition of a given vocabulary over and over again for certain literary purposes is
commonly regarded as an instance of lexical foregrounding.
2. Grammatical Foregrounding
This category involves linguistic oddities in the sphere of morphology or syntax.
Violations in the structural rules of the language produce ill-formed sentences that are
followed by literary writers to convey certain messages to their readers. For example, ill-
formed sentences such as 'I doesn't like him' and 'He me saw' are considered deviated
forms of ' I don't like him' and 'He saw me' respectively.
According to recent theories on syntax, a distinction is normally made between
the deep structure and the surface structure of a sentence. The former directly reflects the
meaning of the sentence, whereas the latter relates to the way in which a sentence is
actually uttered. This entails that deep structure may be characterized as the 'semantic
end' of syntax, and surface structure as the 'phonological end'. Thus, violations of surface
structure are superficial as they have no fundamental effect on the way in which a
sentence is understood, and they are often described as 'bad' or 'incorrect' grammar.
Contrastingly, violations of deep structure do affect the way a sentence is understood. In
a phrase like 'a grief ago' the position reserved for a word of a given class is filled by a
word from a different class, and, hence, the violation expresses the sense intended by the
writer and expected to be perceived by the reader (Leech, 1969: 45).
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3. Phonological Foregrounding
Phonology as a level of language has much to contribute in stylistic analyses as it
is the only means that enables stylisticians to examine the phonetic potential of certain
written texts. Patterns of phonology are more on the surface than those of surface syntactic
structure. It is therefore of a limited use in English literary works. Examples of such kinds
of irregularities in the way words are pronounced can be found in certain cases of elision,
misplacement of word stress, as well as in special pronunciation for the convenience of
rhyming, as, for instance, when a noun like 'wind' is pronounced like the verb 'wind'.
4. Graphological Foregrounding
This type of deviation is also utilized by literary men as a means to fulfill certain
goals. It involves violation of the rules and regulations of the orthographic system of the
language. The American poet E. E. Cummings is well known for his use of typographic
deviation such as discarding of capital letters and punctuation, jumbling of words,
eccentric use of parentheses, etc. For him capitalization, spacing and punctuation are not
merely symbols to be used according to the typographic custom of the language, but are
also expressive visual devices that can be used to express ideas and concepts.
5. Semantic Foregrounding
The presence of an irrational element in poetry is the characteristic generally
considered when dealing with semantic deviation. This kind of deviation, in literature, is
sometimes referred to as 'nonsense' or 'absurdity'. It forces the reader to look beyond the
dictionary definition for a reasonable interpretation. For example, the superficial
absurdity of Wordsworth's 'The child is father of the man' is regarded as semantic
deviation as it requires the reader to go beyond the literal meaning to arrive at the true
interpretation (ibid).
4. Congruence of Foregrounding in Larking's 'Wants' (the analysis)
In this section, Larkin's poem 'Wants' is stylistically analysed in terms of those
textual features that attract some degree of foregrounding. This analysis incorporates
different aspects of language such as lexical, syntactic, semantic, and phonological
aspects.
4.1 Lexical Foregrounding:
Getting through the poem, one can notice that the poet is repeating the first line at
the end of each stanza. So, words like wish, alone, desire, oblivion, run, beyond, and
beneath are repeated. Here, it can be observed that the poet is making use of such words
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to show man's tendency towards loneliness which is, to him, reinforced by the daily
routines and social events that cause unbearable monotony. And this is one of the reasons
that makes an individual think negatively about life and move toward loneliness which is
terminated by death. Tangible examples can be seen in real life when an individual,
depressed with grief, is always trying to go away from the group, go to bed, live alone in
a tranquil place, or even commit a suicide.
The foregrounding via repetition (parallelism) usually involves lexical items that
share certain senses and make a conceptual group in the poem. Reading through the text,
one can find out that the writer is gathering certain vocabularies that are synonymous, for
instance, the words 'wish, wants, desire' are words referring to a felt lack; and the lack
meant here is the lack of being alone. Besides, the words 'alone, death, oblivion ' are all
synonyms dealing with loneliness. The prepositions 'beyond' and 'beneath' are mentioned
by the writer to express deictic remoteness both horizontally and vertically from his
location. Finally, the expressions: invitation cards, printed directions of sex,
photographed, calendar, insurance, fertility, and rites are all referring to social life among
groups and individuals via the intermediate unit, the family.
4.2 Syntactico-Semantic Foregrounding:
In this section, foregrounding, resulting from the blending of syntactic and
semantic issues, is considered to illustrate how some images are conjured up by the writer
through certain words and expressions. The syntactico-semantic issues generally involve
instances where the writer makes use of odd syntactic structures, phrase modifications
and collocations in order to evoke certain feelings on the part of the reader:
In line (2), the sky grows dark with invitation cards, the writer is adopting an odd
collocation; the sky usually grows dark with 'clouds'. This oddity in the collocation along
with the generic use of 'invitation cards' all refer to the overwhelming number of social
obligations the writer believes to have been imposed upon man.
In line (3), the printed directions of sex, the word 'sex' is an abstract noun and
cannot literally have printed directions. Printed directions can be found in manuals or
books on sex. Via this odd structure the writer intends to express his view of sex and love
making as a mere matter of mechanics.
Line (8) involves a syntactic element. The expression 'fertility rights' is pre-
modified by 'tabled', and this is a reference to the writer's opinion that whatever related
to love making is written down in a tabular fashion and hence renders the whole process
unspontaneous and mechanical.
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The structure of the main clause in line (6): Desire of oblivion runs, has its own
peculiarity in the sense that 'desire of oblivion' is abstract and cannot literally run. The
writer's intention in the formulation of this expression is to liken this desire to a river
which runs spontaneously and which is outside one's control; and ,consequently, uses the
analogy to hint at his belief that desire of oblivion is also running spontaneously in man.
The strange use of pre and post modifiers in noun phrases is made use of by the
writer to convey a given opinion. In line (7), for example, the noun phrase 'the artful
tensions of the calendar' is a case to consider. 'calendars' do not literally have tensions.
What the writer aims at is to show that the social engagements are so many that they often
conflict with one another. Moreover, 'tensions' are not made intentionally, hence cannot
be 'artful". Thus, the writer's use of this structure is interpreted as to show that people
sometimes excuse themselves from a social commitment, they do not want to attend, by
pleasing a prior commitment to another engagement. And this is their artful manner to
get rid of some of the many social ceremonies or rituals they dislike.
One more instance in which Larkin collocates words in a strange way is found in
line (9), the costly aversion of the eyes from death, in which the word 'aversion' literally
means to turn one's eyes from something disliked (which is 'death' here). In this noun
phrase, the poet uses the word 'costly' as a modifier to 'aversion' which is normally odd
because 'aversion' cannot be costly. What he tries to formulate in the reader's mind is that
the aversion of peoples' eyes from 'death' is in fact costly in the sense that the social
activities they engage themselves in are actually disadvantageous as they distract their
minds from coming into good terms with 'death'. To him 'death', which is the inevitable
destiny for mankind, is already an invisible desire available within their inner self.
An additional syntactic category is obvious in the writer’s specific use of noun
phrases (the printed directions, the artful tensions, etc.), and his generic use of them
(desire of oblivion). The value of the former is to refer to his particular social life, and the
latter to the way readers feel that his remarks apply to them all.
4.3 Phononogical Foregrounding:
From the point of view of interpretation, there are a number of phonological
characteristics in the poem that bring about a special meaning pertinent to the overall
meaning the writer wants to convey to his readers. The most important of these
phonological issues is the similarity in the repeated prepositional phrases in lines 1, 5, 6
and 10. They all consist of three words with a 2,1,1 syllable pattern. The first syllable of
the first word in the prepositional phrases (beyond all this) and (beneath it all) are
phonologically and graphically identical, the word 'all' is repeated and the other two words
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have the same vowel. This phonological parallelism reinforces the system of parallel
meanings the writer uses in the poem in order to back up the idea that social activities and
commitments are conducive reasons behind the monotony and burden an individual
experiences in life. Furthermore, there are a number of alliterative and assonantal patterns
within the lines which help connect important words together and meanwhile support the
general idea behind the poem. Some of the instances involve:
Line 1 and 5: this , wish ( the repetition of the vowel /i/ and the voiceless fricatives /S/,
/ʃ/
Line 2 : dark , cards ( the sharing vowel /a:/ )
Line 3 : directions , sex (the vowel /e/ )
Line 4 : family , photographed , flagstaff (the repetition of /f/ in initial and final
positions)
4.4 Discussion
The interpretive value of the remarks given in the preceding sections lies in their
effective role in forming a link between the form and the content of the poem under
analysis. Getting through the lines of the poem, one can deduce that the main unifying
feature of 'wants' is parallelism.
It is crucial to distinguish between parallelism and simple repetition, though some
linguists consider the latter as being a limited case of the former (Short, 1996: 13f). The
mere repetition of whole phrases or clauses, in terms of both structure and lexical items,
is just one case of parallelism, and it is a simple one which entails that everything is
paralleled and nothing is varied (Leech and Short, 1981:142). This means that repetition
is one restricted device of producing foregrounding that attracts the reader's attention to
some repetitive lexical grouping, or whole structures excluding any possibility of variety
(Short, 1996: 18).
In 'Wants', parallelism via repetition holds our concern, as it is a rather more
interesting device that has the power to foreground the key parts of the poem in a way
that stimulates literary insights. This kind of parallelism is defined by Simpson (204: 50)
as one guise of foregrounding, besides deviation from the norm, which comes in the form
of more of the same. The instances of this type of parallelism in the poem can be jotted
down as follows:
in stanza (1), lines 2-4 are parallel and the poet endeavours to show them as similar
though they refer to different aspects of social life; and he then contrasts them with the
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wish to be alone, i.e. the poet wants to tell the reader that although human beings indulge
themselves so deep into the social life, they are in fact hiding their inner desire to be alone.
In stanza (2), the lines (6) and (10) are parallel, in respect to aspects of phonetics, syntax
and punctuation, to lines (1) and (5), and they constitute two sets of repeated lines. The
parallelism here is seized by the writer to make a sort of equilibrium between (the wish
to be alone) and (the wish for oblivion or death) in the first and second stanzas
respectively. In addition, the vocabularies used in these two stanzas are synonymous and
are carefully selected by the poet to exhibit the social life activities as mechanical every
day routines that cause monotony and frustration; and meanwhile they indirectly refer to
the inner desire of mankind for loneliness which reaches its eternity in death. This
parallelism might also be said to have the effect of showing a disjunction between the
realities, man as a social animal in all his guises, and the wish for loneliness and death.
Although what Larking thinks sounds radical, it resembles the famous words of Hamlet:
To die, to sleep and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to 'tis a consummation(70)
Devoutly to be wish'd.
A more careful observation of the two stanzas unravels another idea: that the
writer, after the preposition 'beyond' in stanza (1), uses expressions denoting positive
things, while after the preposition 'beneath' in stanza (2), uses words referring mostly to
negative aspects of life. One can conclude from this that the writer seems to claim that
human beings, whether they lead a happy or desperate life, whether they live in prosperity
or misery, have tendency towards loneliness and death. He argues that those who are in
possession of wealth and fortune spend enormously to make themselves forget that they
are going to die, not realizing that death is inescapable and inevitable, and that sooner or
later we all have to surrender to death. Nothing can reduce the overwhelming impact and
magnitude of death. What we do in social life is to benumb ourselves. Youth, beauty, and
happiness are all transitory as life is an excruciating journey. To Larkin, the desire to be
alone is the death instinct itself crying out for attention; as if one wants to say ‘stop the
world, I want to get off’.
One more point that raises controversy here is that getting through the poem line
by line one can notice that the poet sees the desire of man for loneliness as something
innate or inborn- the clue lies in his analogy of likening the desire for loneliness and death
to something (like a river) which runes spontaneously, and makes a generalization about
it, i.e. he believes that this desire is their within mankind even if he lives a prosperous
life. But as the lines within the two stanzas are all referring to social life engagements and
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their effect on an individual, the researcher makes another argument that this wish or
desire for being alone (death) must not be innate or inborn, but actually made and
triggered off by the social surrounding, that is, by the people living around and by the
burden caused by social commitments.
5. Conclusion
The stylistic analysis carried out in this paper is by no means final, and there is no
need to risk generalization from it. However, one can broadly state that Larking in this
poem declares one important longing that is solitude, hidden at the bottom of human heart.
He uncovers the essential vacuum of the human heart in which every individual is lonely
and likes to be alone. On the other hand, he guides readers to comprehend three poignant
truths about life such as futility, death, and oblivion.
Full stylistic description of 'Wants' might possibly need to be far more elaborate.
However, it is to be noted that any reasonable interpretation of the poem will have to take
into account the features thrown up by stylistic analysis.
The analytic procedure adopted in this paper proved useful in achieving some
insights into Larking's style as a set of deliberate choices. The foregrounded features of
the linguistic texture of the poem stimulate certain literary-aesthetic purposes the writer
endeavours to communicate. The main focus in this study has been on 'parallelism'. The
way it has been foregrounded contributes a lot to the literary meanings related to the
writer's viewpoint concerning social life commitments and man's tendency to go away
from them, and move towards loneliness represented by oblivion or death. This is
achieved in the poem by the paralleled (repeated) words and expressions in the first and
second stanzas.
The parallelism observed in the poem is conducted by the writer through different
avenues: the simple repetition of lexical items, phonological-syntactic structures, and odd
sets of collocations. The writer's goal is found to claim that human being's unconscious
desire of oblivion and death (manifested via the analogy between 'desire of oblivion' and
'a running river') , even if they lead a happy or desperate life (expressed deictically
through the prepositions 'beyond' and 'beneath'); is something innate and inbuilt. As the
poet reiterates, through parallel structures, the monotony and burden caused by social
commitments, the researcher believes that the desire of oblivion stated by the writer does
not seem to be inborn, but is made and triggered of by the social surrounding and the
community individuals belong to.
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on Linguistics and Arts (CIC-LITART’18), June 27-28, 2018
References
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