Sound: Parallelism

Symbol Analysis

Parallelism is one way to talk about the way the couplets function in lines 5-14, which is the section where the speaker demonstrates how his theory of sound and sense works. The first line of the couplet gives an example of an image in a poem, while the second line of the pair comments on how that image should sound. Couplets lend themselves to this sort of organization simply because they always come in twos.