1) Introduction:

The discipline of stylistics focuses on applying theoretical concepts and analytical methods, drawn from linguistics, to examine literary texts, aiming for a more comprehensive and objective analysis. It involves studying style which pertains to how language is employed by an individual in a specific context; in literature, it encompasses the complete linguistic range a writer employs within a particular work. Among the tools for analyzing a writer’s style are linguistic ‘deviation and parallelism.' (Niazi & Gautam, 2007) This paper seeks to utilize these approaches to interpret Longfellow’s 'The Rainy Day.' Its goal is to help readers comprehend, and appreciate the literary and poetic techniques the writer uses to convey his message effectively.

Poetry is, by nature, a highly patterned language among the literary genres (Niazi & Gautam, 2007). Hence, it is often useful to analyze the grammatical forms and syntactic structures employed by a poet to convey their messages to their readers and audiences. Longfellow’s ‘The Rainy Day’ is worth analyzing in this respect.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), the second-oldest in a family of eight children, was a teacher at Bowdoin College in Maine, and later at Harvard University. He was the most popular American poet of the nineteenth century, who suffered much tragedy in his personal life. The poem The Rainy Day investigates themes of nature, emotion, and depression. It has been interpreted as a deeply personal look into the poet’s psyche and state of mind. Longfellow was the first of a group of writers known as the "Fireside Poets," called such for their popularity with families all over the country who gathered by the fire in the evenings to read the work of these poets aloud. ‘The Rainy Day’ is a three-stanza poem that is separated into sets of five lines, known as quintains. These quintains follow a simple rhyme scheme of AABBA, changing end sounds from stanza to stanza.

The procedure to follow, in this paper, is to go through the poem stanza by stanza, analyzing them with reference to deviation and parallelism, investigating the role of these stylistic devices in producing the poetic effects, exploring how they contribute to the stylistic and thematic impact of the poem. The purpose behind all this, to unravel the hidden agenda behind the entire poem and to illustrate the implicit meanings the poet endeavors to convey to his readers.

2) Stylistic Concepts (Deviation & Parallelism):

2.1 An Overview of Foregrounding: The concept of foregrounding has its origin in the works of the Russian formalists, particularly in the ones by Shklovskij (1893-1984)), who views the literary art as a process not a product; its function is to approach the sensation of objects and help readers view the world in a different way. To him, the device often utilized by writers to achieve this aim is ‘defamiliarization’ or ‘making strange’. From his point of view, the function of any given piece of an art is to deautomatize our perceptions by making the forms difficult or unfamiliar; by increasing the length of one’s perception; emphasizing the new meanings and emotional effects of the forms; and in this way, the process of perception will then have an aesthetic end in itself (Niazi& Gautam (2007):

An art exists so that one may recover the sensation of life;

it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they

are perceived and not as they are known. It is a way of experiencing

the artfulness of an object; the

object is not important

(Lemon & Reis,1965: 12)

The above lines reiterate that the goal of art is not to let you know the things you see, but to enable you to feel and perceive the senses associated with them.

The Prague School was behind the concept of foregrounding which claims that the essence of poeticality lies in the deformation of the language, and in the violation of its rules. This concept of foregrounding was first introduced into the study of literature in the west by Garvin (1964). He acquainted the western literature with the idea that the poetic language is not defined in terms of its properties, but in terms of its function which lies in its aesthetic effects. Another influential figure behind the concept of foregrounding is the Czech scholar Mukarovsky (1891-1975) who states his viewpoint as follows:

Foregrounding is the opposite of

automatization, that is, the

deautomatization of an act; the more

an act is automatized, the less it is

consciously executed. The more it is

foregrounded, the more completely

conscious does it become. Objectively

speaking: automatization schematizes

an event; foregrounding means the

violation of the scheme.

Mukarovský, J. (1932)

To Mukarovsky, communication becomes subsidiary in poetic language, and it is foregrounding that enables literature to result in new, intricate, and complex meanings that ordinary language does not account for.

Other proponents of the notion of foregrounding subsume the Russian linguist and literary figure Norman Jakobson (1896-1982) who highlighted another important category relevant to foregrounding which is the concept of parallelism, i.e. the reoccurrence of similar features or linguistic structures in a given text. Accordingly, foregrounding can be said to occur as a result of two stylistic devices: deviation and parallelism; the former referring to digression from the norms of language, and the latter to the reoccurrence of similar linguistic or stylistic features (Niazi & Gautam, 2007).

Simpson (2004), on the other hand, dwells on the notion of foregrounding and gives it the following minute definition:

Foregrounding refers to a form of textual pattering which is motivated specifically for literary aesthetic purposes. F.G. typically involves a stylistic distortion of some sort, either through an aspect of the text which deviates from a linguistic norm, or, alternatively, where an aspect of the text is brought to the fore through repetition or parallelism (Simpson, 2004, p. 50).

The above details ascertain that foregrounding can be said to have a linguistic perspective, and is embodied by the two main devices of deviation and parallelism. Pragmatically speaking, it may be identified as the concept that denotes the interaction of author, literary text, and reader; and its devices guide the readers in their interpretation of literary texts, and show them the aesthetic effects of what they read (ibid).

2.2 Deviation: The notion of style as deviance is closely relevant to the concept of foregrounding. It is one of the most significant concepts that linguistics has contributed to literary criticism (Niazi & Gautam, 2007). This notion is developed from the works of the Russian and Czech Formalists like Shklovsky and Mukarovsky who suggested the ideas of 'defamiliarisation' and 'foregrounding' respectively. According to them, the main purpose of art was to make people see the world in a new way through 'defamiliarisation' or 'making strange'. The quotation below exhibits Shklovsky’s identifying of ‘defamiliarization’:

The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.

The notion of foregrounding is achieved by highlighting or making prominent, particular textual features; and this consequently entails breaking the norms of the standard language with the result that one characteristic of literariness is regarded as a degree of linguistic deviance (Finch, 2005). These devices are referred to as stylistic strategies that are closely associated with a specific type of aesthetic exploitation of language that takes the form of surprising a reader into a fresh awareness of, and sensitivity to, the linguistic medium which is normally taken for granted as an 'automatized' background of communication (Leech & Short 1981: 28). Deviation as a stylistic device is said to have been utilized by writers as a strategy to establish a hierarchy of meanings and themes in the text, bringing some to the fore and shifting others to the background. It is considered as the core of reader-centered stylistics as it provides a theory of analysis with the help of which a reader develops the habits necessary for active and independent reading (Niazi and Gautam 2007). Thus, according to this stylistic strategy, the frequency of features in a given text can be measured against equivalent figures which are normal in language use; the style then can be measured in terms of 'deviations' from the norm (ibid).

Moreover, stylistic variations, known as deviation or foregrounding, hypothetically lead to defamiliarization, evoke feelings, and lengthen the reading time. Broadly, foregrounded segments of a story are often associated with increased reading times, greater strikingness ratings, and greater affect ratings. Response to foregrounding is even independent of literary competence or experience, and it is indeed a distinctive aspect of interaction with literary texts in general (Miall and kuiken 1994, 389).

Linguistic deviation then refers to the range of stylistic effects that occur in literature, whether at the phonetic level (e.g., alliteration, rhyme), the grammatical level (e.g., inversion, ellipsis), or the semantic level (e.g., metaphor, irony). To Mukarovský (1964), this device may occur in normal, everyday language, such as spoken discourse or journalistic prose, but it occurs at random with no systematic design. In literary texts, it is structured: it tends to be both systematic and hierarchical. With everyday language, communication is the primary purpose, and such strategies are normally not involved. But in literature the purpose of its use is to disrupt such everyday communication, i.e., deviation enables literature to present meanings with such intricacy and complexity that ordinary language does not normally allow (ibid).

In the same way, Shklovsky (1965) argues that stylistic devices do more than convey familiar meanings: the function of the literary image is not to make us perceive meaning, but to create a special perception of the object. He thinks that the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.

Summarizing Shklovsky and Mukarovsky's viewpoints concerning deviation, we understand that Shklovsky saw deviation, in the form of defamiliarization, "emphasize the emotional effect of an expression" (Shklovsky, 1965); whereas Mukarovský's believes that, when used poetically, words and groups of words evoke a greater richness of images and feelings than if they were to occur in a communicative utterance (Mukarovsky, 1977)

2.2.1 Internal Deviation: A given text may deviate from an internal norm. As such, this type of deviation can be seen to work on the inside level of the text. This entails that a given text itself may develop its own internal norm which may itself be subject to deviation (Traugott 1980). This kind of deviation takes place within the text itself, i.e., it is deviation within deviation. It is generally taken as a stylistic device that foregrounds some parts of the literary text. This strategy works under an assumption that the author, consciously or unconsciously, is signaling such parts as important to readers' understanding of what he has written (Cluysenaar, 1976). Relevant to the concept of internal deviation, Halliday (1971: 330) maintains that the concept of prominence, resulted from deviation, is not only produced by 'departure from a norm', but even by 'attainment of a norm'.

Leech (2001) states that 'attainment of a norm' means either the approximation to some external norm as a 'disguise', or at least as a point of reference, or that the writer creates his own special kind of language. To Short (1996), this means that the features of the language used by a literary writer in a given text may depart from the norms of the text itself, i.e., they may stand out against the background of what the text has led us to expect.

As an illustrative example to clarify the concept of internal deviation, Levin (1998) postulates an indicative case about the literary style of (e.e. Cummings) stating that:

When e.e.Cummings begins his

poems with lower case letters at the beginning of each line, he is not

breaking a rule of English. Rather he is deviating from a genre norm, that for poetry. If, after years of writing poems with lines beginning with

lower case letters, he suddenly wrote a poem which conformed to our genre norm, he, in the way, would still surprise knowledgeable readers of his poetry; as he would now deviate from his personal authorial norm which he had established over a long period of writing. (p.225)

The above explanation has shown that (e.e.Cummings) has established a pattern of his own. Hence, the poems written by him can be said to have set up their own world in which the norm is to write poems with lines initiating with lower case letters. This phenomenon of internal deviation is generally investigated in poetry, but it can also be traced in other literary genres such as prose and fiction.

2.2.2 External Deviation: Undoubtedly,’ language, in its broadest conceptualization, is not a haphazard mass of sounds and symbols, but an intricate web of levels, links and layers’ (Simpson, 2004). Violating aspects of these linguistic levels and layers, in a given literary work, is taken as an external deviation.

As has been explained before, linguistic deviation can be regarded as a strategy used in literary works to encode some key literary meanings via certain linguistic features. These features represent a stylistic distortion of some sort through an aspect of the text which deviates from a linguistic norm. External deviation can be said to work on the outside level of a given text.

A given stylistic deviation is dubbed external if it pertains to a violation in the norms or rules of the language system. Different types of external deviation can be identified across a number of interrelated levels of linguistic description: phonological, graphological, syntactical, morphological etc. (Simpson, 2004). To exemplify the above type of deviation, Faulkner, in his novel 'As I Lay Dying', uses a sentence like 'they was going on past the store without stopping'. In this sentence, there is a clear example of a violation of one of the rules of English syntax; there is lack of number-agreement between the subject (they) and the auxiliary verb (was), and this is a vivid example of an external deviation (Faulkner, 1965).

2.3 Parallelism: Parallelism is a poetic technique or device by which writers repeat grammatically similar words or parts of a sentence throughout a poem or text. As a literary device, parallelism is similar to a synonym, in that it focuses on the same or similar ideas repeated more than once. It is important to differentiate between parallelism and simple repetition, though some linguists consider the latter a limited case of the former (Short, 1996). The mere repetition of phrases and clauses in terms of structure and lexical categories is but one case of parallelism, and it is a simple one which denotes that everything is paralleled and nothing is carried (Leech & Short, 1981). Thus, repetition is one restricted device of producing foregrounding that attracts the reader’s attention to some clear-cut repetitive lexical groupings or whole structures excluding any possibility of variety (Short, 1996). It is further defined by Simpson (2004) as one guise of foregrounding, besides deviation from a norm, which comes in the form of more of the same. It can be seen not only as a process of replicating a specific pattern, but also as a tool which attracts our attention where ‘some features are held constant (Short, 1996).

3) Analysis of Longfellow’s The Rainy Day through ‘Deviation’ and ‘Parallelism’:

Among the literary genres, poetry is often written in a highly featured pattern that is worth analyzing via the stylistic tools and mechanisms postulated by stylisticians. The tools adopted in this paper include parallelism and internal deviation that play a vital role in unraveling the poet’s agenda, and the concepts he endeavors to convey to his readers in his poem ‘The Rainy Day’:

3.1 Parallelism: If we examine the poem, focusing on the first and second stanzas, we note that the syntactic structure and patterns of the lines encompass the following features:

A. The verbs are all in the present simple tense

B. The first and the last lines in each stanza involve a form of the verb-to be; whereas, in the lines between them, the verbs are lexical action verbs.

a. to be / present simple (Line 1)

b. to rain / present simple (Line 2)

c. to cling / present simple (Line 3)

d. to fall / present simple (Line 4)

e. to be / present simple (Line 5)

C. the adjectives ‘cold, dark and dreary’ are repeated in both

D. the subjects ‘the day’ and ‘it’ are repeated in the lines of each; and the rest are roughly synonymous.

E. In both stanzas, the lines are expressed in the declarative mood.

Accordingly, we can maintain that parallelism, the repetition of certain grammatical structures or patterns, is utilized by Longfellow in the first two stanzas as a mechanism to show the repetitive cyclic events in nature as well as in an individual’s life. The repeated adjectives ‘cold, dark, and dreary’ all arouse a desperate sort of melancholic feeling. Besides, the word ‘day’ is singular in the first stanza, but plural in the second; and this also shows the repetition and the inevitability of sorrow in man’s life. The first stanza depicts a realistic rainy day which is gloomy (cold, dark, and dreary); whereas, in the second stanza, the poet changes ‘the day’ to ‘my life’ to express the same gloomy thought, i.e. to express his own inner feeling that he is sad and depressed. Thus, by mirroring the structure of the first stanza in the second stanza, the poet makes a direct comparison between nature and human experience, claiming that just as rainy days are inevitable, so too are sorrow and hardship in life (the text of the poem is provided in the appendix for reference).

3.2 Internal Deviation: The concept of internal deviation is one particular mechanism, among the others, utilized to achieve an exceptional type of linguistic foregrounding. Any given text may develop its own internal norm which is itself subservient to deviation. This sort of deviation is operative inside the text, i.e. as deviation within deviation. In The Rainy Day, we observe that the poet in the first two stanzas, sticks to a given syntactic pattern or norm i.e. the use of the present simple form of verbs in the declarative mood; whereas, in the third stanza, he shifts to

a. the use of a different type of grammatical mood (the imperative) to signal a digression from the norm he first started with in the first two stanzas. Hence, the deviation has taken place at the internal level of the text; that is, from a norm within the text itself;

b. the use of the obsolete subject (thy/line 3), and postposed subjects (lines 2 and 4)

The poet’s shift from a given grammatical pattern, (the declarative mood) in the first two stanzas, to another, (the imperative mood) in the third stanza, is a clear example of internal deviation that leads to foregrounding. The foregrounded concept is the poet’s intention to give a piece of advice to his readers; that despite difficulties; one must not give up ‘hope’ and one must be optimistic about the upcoming changes in life. He puts this concept of optimism in a nutshell in his line: into each life some rain must fall; which entails that personal struggle is universal and unavoidable.

The use of the obsolete subject ‘thy’, as an archaic poetic form for the second person singular possessive pronoun ‘you’, is intended by the poet to add a formal timeless quality to the poem; this timelessness reinforces the concept of universality of sorrow and human struggle; and, meanwhile, keeps the reflective and melancholic tone of the stanza. Moreover, in lines 2 and 4, the foregrounded phrases ‘behind the clouds’ and ‘into each life’ are moved to the fore. The former is to advise readers not to lose hope and feel optimistic, as in the proverb ‘every cloud is followed by a silver lining’. The latter reiterates that sorrow is inevitable and universal (c.f. the text in the appendix).

4) Conclusion:

The present work has tackled the analysis of Longfellow’s The Rainy Day using the stylistic devices of parallelism and deviation. The research can be said to have reached the following conclusions:

1. In The Rainy Day, the poet utilizes parallelism to impart the idea of cyclic repetition of events and states, and also to show emphasis on and reiteration of the truth behind certain natural and social phenomena.

2. The role of internal deviation in The Rainy Day is mainly to foreground a concept in the third stanza, contrary to what the poet struck first at the outset of the poem in the first two stanzas. The poet foregrounds the idea of optimism and helps his readers not to lose hope in life.

3. The use of parallelism and deviation in the poem lengthens the reading time on the part of the readers, i.e. readers exert more effort, and spend more time until they comprehend the writer’s intention, and the style used to convey it. At the same time, lengthening the reading time and requiring greater effort on the readers’ part, renders the literary work more interesting, and helps readers take delight in what they read.

4. In The Rainy Day, parallelism and deviation, as two stylistic methods, simultaneously express a contrast between sorrow and happiness or between struggle and perseverance, which gives the readers awareness about life that involves ups and downs, on the one

hand, and struggle to survive, on the other.

5. Parallelism and Internal Deviation prove to be vital stylistic tools by which literary writers, particularly poets, convey their thoughts to the readers; and by which readers, in their turn, can unravel the hidden agenda behind a given piece of literature.

REFERENCES

Finch, G. (2005). Linguistic Terms and Concepts. London: Macmillan.

Gluysenaar, A. (1976). Introduction to Literary Stylistics. London: Batsford.

Leech, G. and Michael Short (1981). Style in Fiction. London: Longman.

Leech, G. (2001). Linguistics and the Figures of Rhetoric. London: Longman.

Niazi, N. and Rama Gautum (2007). How to Study Literature: stylistic and pragmatic Approaches. Tehran: Rahnama Press.

Miall, D. and Don Kuiken (1994). Foregrounding, Defamiliarization, and Affect. In Poetics, 22, 389-392.

Mukarovský, J. (1964)." Standard language and poetic language". In P. L. Garvin (ed.), A Prague School reader on esthetics, literary structure, and style, (pp. 17-30) Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Simpson, P. (2004). Stylistics. London: Rout ledge.

Short, M. (1996). Exploring the language of Poems, Plays and Prose. London: Longman.

Shklovsky, V. (1965). "Art as technique". In L. T. Lemon & M. J. Reis (Trans.), Russian formalist criticism: Four essays. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Traugott, E. and M. Pratt (1980). Linguistics for Students of Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

Van Peer, W. (1986) Stylistics and Psychology-Investigating Foregrounding. Croom Helms Linguistics series.

Appendix

The Rainy Day
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.

My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.

الانحراف والتوازي في مسرحية "اليوم الممطر" للونغفيلو: دراسة أسلوبية

الملخص:

يتناول هذا البحث تحليل قصيدة "اليوم الماطر" ل ( Longfellow) من منظور اسلوب التوازي والانحراف النمطي، وهما أداتان أسلوبيتان تستخدمان لكشف القصد وراء أي عمل أدبي معين. ويقال إن هذه الأدوات الأسلوبية قد استخدمها الكتاب و الادباء كإستراتيجيات لإنشاء تركيب هرمي للمعاني والموضوعات في النص، كابراز بعضها في المقدمة، ونقل البعض الآخر إلى الخلف، أو تكرار بعض السمات البنيوية هنا وهناك. الإجراء المتبع في هذا البحث هو تحليل القصيدة قيد الدراسة، والتي تتكون من ثلاثة مقاطع، في ضوء الأدوات الأسلوبية المذكورة أعلاه، مع إبراز دورهما في الكشف عن نية الشاعر وراء هذا العمل الأدبي. وقد توصلت الدراسة إلى بعض الاستنتاجات، مثل: أن الشاعر يستخدم اسلوب التوازي لاظهار التكرار الدوري للأحداث الطبيعية والاجتماعية التي غالبًا ما تسبب الملل والرتابة؛ ويستخدم الكاتب الانحراف الضمنيي لإحداث تباين بين الفكرة المعبرة عنها في المقطعين الأولين، وأخرى مذكورة في المقطع الثالث. وتختتم الدراسة بقائمة من المراجع التي تم الاستفادة منها في كتابةالبحث.

الكلمات المفتاحية: الانحراف، الأسلوبية، التوازي، التحليل، المقدمة.

بوخته:

ئه م توێژینەوەیە باس لە شیکاری شیعری "ڕۆژی باراناوی"ی (Longfellow) دەکات لە ڕوانگەی هاوتەریبی و لادانى بيكهاته يى، کە دوو ئامێری ستایلستیکین بۆ ئاشکراکردنی مەبەستی پشت هەر بەرهەمێکی ئەدەبی دیاریکراو. دەگوترێ ئەم ريكا ستایلیستییانە لەلایەن نووسەرانەوە وەک ستراتیژێک بۆ دروستکردنی پێکهاتەیەکی پلەبەندی لە مانا و بابەتەکان لە دەقێکدا بەکارهێنراون، وەک هێنانە پێشەوەی هەندێکیان، گواستنەوەی هەندێکی دیکە بۆ پاشخان، یان دووبارەکردنەوەی هەندێک تایبەتمەندی پێکهاتەیی لێرە و لەوێ. ئەو ڕێکارەی لەم لێکۆڵینەوەیەدا پەیڕەو دەکرێت بریتییە لە شیکردنەوەی ئەو شیعرەی کە لە ژێر لێکۆڵینەوەدایە، کە لە سێ بڕگە پێکهاتووە، لە ژێر ڕۆشنایی ئەو ئامرازە ستایلیستیانەی کە لە سەرەوە باسمان کرد، تیشک دەخاتە سەر ڕۆڵی ئەوان لە ئاشکراکردنی مەبەستی شاعیر لە پشت ئەم بەرهەمە ئەدەبییەوە. لێکۆڵینەوەکە گەیشتە هەندێک دەرەنجام، وەک: شاعیر لە میتۆدی هاوتەریبی کەڵک وەردەگرێت بۆ نیشاندانی دووبارەبوونەوەی دەورەیی ڕووداوە سروشتی و کۆمەڵایەتییەکان کە زۆرجار دەبنە هۆی بێزاری وه ره س بوون؛ نووسەر لە لادانێکی ناڕاستەوخۆ کەڵک وەردەگرێت بۆ دروستکردنی کۆنتراستێک لە نێوان ئەو بیرۆکەیەی کە لە دوو بڕگەی یەکەمدا دەربڕدراوە و بیرۆکەیەکی دیکە کە لە بڕگەی سێیەمدا ئاماژەی پێکراوە. توێژینەوەکە بە لیستی ئەو سه رجاوانە کۆتایی دێت کە لە نووسینی توێژینەوەکەدا بەکارهێنراون.

* Corresponding Author.

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