Parallelism

Not all lines of poetry make a metrical pattern. Taking his cue from the long, looping flow of the poetry of the King James Bible, 19th-century American poet Walt Whitman often crafted his lines to go longer than ten syllables, sometimes creating sentence patterns by repeating word order with slight variation rather than repeating the pattern of syllabic stress or the number of words:

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

(from “Song of Myself,” 1855)



In the first line of this segment, “the shelves are crowded with perfumes” is a so-called sentence “rhyme” with “Houses and rooms are full of perfumes” because the two phrases follow a similar word order. In the next line, “and know it” “rhymes” in a similar way with “and like it.”

Whitman’s break with regular meter, his repetition of sentence parts, and his longer line greatly influenced other North American poets, as well as Latin Americans, including Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and Peruvian poet César Vallejo. The sentence part rhymes are boldfaced below:

. . . when the wheat hardens its little hip-joints and lifts its face of a thousand hands,
I make my way to the grove where the woman and the man embrace . . .

(Pablo Neruda, “Being Born in the Woods,” 1958; trans. Pablo Neruda and W. S. Merwin, 1973)





Why the rope, then, if air is so simple? What is the chain for, if iron exists on its own?
César Vallejo, the accent with which you love, the language with which you write, the soft wind with which you hear, only know of you through your throat.

(César Vallejo, Untitled, 1937; trans. Clayton Eshleman and Jose Rubia Barcía, 1978)