Fragments of Ancient Poetry by James MacPherson
page 11 of 63 (17%)
page 11 of 63 (17%)
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_Completion_ What voice is that I hear? That voice like the summer wind. ("Fragment I") The warriours saw her, and loved; Their souls were fixed on the maid. Each loved her, as his fame; Each must possess her or die. But her soul was fixed on Oscur; My son was the youth of her love. ("Fragment VII") Macpherson also used grammatical parallelism as a structural device; a series of simple sentences is often used to describe a landscape: Autumn is dark on the mountains; Grey mist rests on the hills. The whirlwind is heard on the heath. Dark rolls the river through the narrow plain. ("Fragment V") The poems also have a discernible rhythmical pattern; the tendency of the lines to form pairs is obvious enough when there is semantic or grammatical parallelism, but there is a general binary pattern throughout. Typically, the first unit is a simple sentence, the second almost any grammatical structure--an appositive, a prepositional phrase, a participle, the second element of a compound verb, a dependent clause. A simile--in grammatical terms, |
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