The Linguistic Technique of Parallelism in Al-Ahwas Al-Ansari’s Poetry: A Stylistic Study

Parallelism is one of the most conspicuous stylistic techniques that are marked by the receivers ear, and it also has an excellent musical rhythm. Al-Ahwas1 thoroughly familiarizes readers with an entire host of parallelistic arrangements in his poetry, which makes the semantic units a rich material for the aesthetic study. The present study presents the most beautiful uses of all varieties of parallelism in a corpus of Al-Ahwass poetry, as the reader of his poetry would never miss observing the many images of parallelism based on semantic concordance, as well as the parallelism that appears in one line, or in a stanza, based on structural concordance, in addition to the parallelism formed by the morphological rhythm which is based on the repetition of a morphological derivative formulae. Al-Ahwas did not suffice himself with the similar morphological formulae to achieve rhythm, but he also aimed at the parallelism achieved by repetition, which falls into several patterns. They can be included in one verse line, or within a number lines conforming to one idea, but with different contexts. The second pattern of repetition in terms of rhythm and structure is Epanaphora, or Epanalepsis: which is a repetitive structure based on inserting a word at the beginning of the speech and then repeating the same word at the end of the speech. Al-Ahwas achieved a high rhythmical harmony using parallelism besides a semantic goal by deliberately intensifying parallel words and functioning units in a network revolving around the dominant idea. This study hopes to pave the way for future avenues of studies in poetry under the category of stylistics.