Parallelism

Parallelism is a stylistic figure consisting in the identical or similar syntactic construction of adjacent segments of speech (lines, sentences, stanzas). Syntactic parallelism creates rhythmic orderedness and the semantic correlation of the juxtaposed parts. A special variety is the psychological parallelism of folklore, in which a picture of nature is placed alongside a human experience, revealing it through analogy ("Oh, in the meadow the red guelder rose has bent low — for some reason our glorious Ukraine has grown sorrowful"). Parallelism is one of the most ancient principles of the organisation of folk-poetic speech and is closely linked to the composition of a work. It may combine with anaphora, antithesis and repetition, forming complex structures of figurative juxtaposition in poetry and prose.