For his new species of poetry Macpherson drew upon the stylistic
techniques of the King James Version of the Bible, just as Blake
and Whitman were to do later. As Bishop Lowth was the first to
point out, parallelism is the basic structural technique.
Macpherson incorporated two principal forms of parallelism in his poems:
_repetition_, a pattern in which the second line nearly restates the
sense of the first, and _completion_ in which the second line picks
up part of the sense of the first line and adds to it. These are
both common in the _Fragments_, but a few examples may be useful.
I have rearranged the following lines and in the other passages relating
to the structure of the poems in order to call attention to
the binary quality of Macpherson's verse:

_Repetition_

Who can reach the source of thy race, O Connal?
And who recount thy Fathers? ("Fragment V")


Oscur my son came down;
The mighty in battle descended. ("Fragment VI")


Oscur stood forth to meet him;
My son would meet the foe. ("Fragment VIII")


Future times shall hear of thee;
They shall hear of the fallen Morar. ("Fragment XII")