Lingua 21 (1968) 597-609, North-Eolland Publ-~shing Co.

, Amsterdam
Not to be reproduced by photo,print or mierufiim without written i.ermission from the publisher

POF-TRY OF G R A M M A R A N D
GR..AM.~dAR O F P O E T R Y :)
ROMAN JAKOBSON

According ~to EcI ~ard Sapir (1921), the juxtapositien of such sequences as t J~: [arn,,er kills the ducklfng and the man takes the chfck
makes us 'fee]( ins.t :nctively, without the slightest ~ttempt at conscious analysi,~ tha1 the two sentences fit precisely the same pattern,
that they are really the sam e fundamenta.1 sentence, differing only in
their material trappings. I-a other words, they express identical relational concepts in an iden' :ical manner.' Conversely, we may modify
the sentence or it:; single words 'in some purely relational, nonmaterial regard' without altering any o'f the material concepts expressed. When ~saig ,~_i'a4~tc ce~ain term.,; of the sentence a different
pesition in it..a s 5 ~Lt~,~,lic T~ tern and replacing, for instance, the word
order 'A kills B' b3" the in~, erse sequence 'B kills A', ",e do not vary,
the material concepts invclved but uniquely their rautual relationship. Likewise a substituti ~n of/armers for [ar:~ner or killed for hills
alters only the relational concepts of the sent~'nce, while there are
no changes in the 'concrete wherewithal of speech'; its 'material
trappings' remain invariable.
Despite sorae borderline, transitional formations, there is in language a def!inite, clear-cut discrimination between these two classes
ol expressed concepts - material and relational - or, in more
technical terms, between the lexical and grammatical aspects of
language. The linguist must faithfully follow this objective structural
dichotomy arid tl,otoughly translate the grammatical concepts,

x) The Englis/h :recension of m y paper presented at the International Cor~ference for Poetics in Warsaw, 1960, appears for the first time, while it:!~two
other ver~iot~s have been, published, the ti.u~i_~n variant in the volume of the
Polish Academy of Sciences, Poetics Po~'tyka Poktika (Warsaw 1961), and the
German in Math,~l~atik und Dichtung, ed. by H. Kreuzer (Munich 19651.

59'7

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ROMAN JAKOBSON

ac,'_ually present in a given language, into his technical metalanguage, without any imposition of arbitrary or outlandish categories
uLpon the, language observed. The categories described are intrinsic
constituents of the verbal code, maneuvered by the language users,
and not at all 'grammarian's conveniences:', as even such attentive
i:aquirers into poets' grammar as, e.g., Dona;'d Davie were inclined
ta believe.
A difference in grammatical concepts does not necessarily represent a difference in the state of affairs reYerred to. If one witness
a~serts that 'the farmer killed the duckling', while the other affirms
t~'~at 'the duckling was killed by the farmer', the two men cannot be
accused of presenting discrepant testimonie~, in spite of the polar
difference between the grammatical concept,.~ expressed by active
and pa~s~iivo
,~ " of affairs is pre...... constpactions. One and "~'~
,.~c same state
sented by the sentences: Lie (or iying or to lie) is a sin (or fs sin]ul),
70 lie is to sin, Liars sin (or are sin.hal or are sinners),, nr with a gener;dizing sm~:,~ular The liar sins (or is sin/ul, is a sinne:v). .Only the way
of presentation differs. Fundame'atally the same equat~ona~l proposition may be expressed in terms of actors (liars~, s,n~,ers) or actions
(!o lie, to sin) and we may present these actions 'a:~ if' abstracted
(lying) and r.,ified (lie, sin) or ascribe them to tht subject as its
w~Derties (sir/ul). The part of speech is one of tLe. grammatical
c:~tegories which reflect, according to Sapir's manuaL, 'not so much
,,~r intuitive ana.lysis of reality as our ability to compose that reality
irate, a variety of formal patterns'. Later, in his preliminary notes to
t;le planned Fou.ndations o/ Language, Sapir (1930) o~tlined the
fundamental type~ of referents which serve as 'a naturai basis for
parts of speech', namely existents and their linguistic expression: the
mmn ; occu,,rents expressed by the verb; and finally modes o/existence
and occ2"Trence represented in language by the ad;ective and the
adverb Te.,pectively.
Jeremv Bentham, who was perhaps the first to di,;dose the maniff&l 'tin~;~2~tic fictions' which underlie the grammatical structure
;~;Id which ,~.re used throughout tl-~e whole field of language as a
'r~,ecessary resource', arrived in his Theory o/[ictions at a ~hallenging
conclu_~ior : 'To langtage, then - to language alone - it is that
fl,:titio~s er::ities owe tlheir existence their impossible, yet indispens:,.bi::e . . ~ M ~ . " Li,,~Li~tic fictions should neither be 'mistaken fo)
rea:ities r,or be a~rib~.'d to the creative fancy of linguists: they 'owe

I'OETRY

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GRAMMAR

OF P O E T R Y

599

their exi:~tence' actually '=to language alone' and particularly t(~ the.
'grammatical form of the dis ~.ourse', in Bentham's terms.
The indispensai~le, mm, da,.aty role played by the grammatical
concepts confronts us with the intricate problem of the relationship
between referential, cognitive value and linguistic fiction. Is the
significance of grammatical concepts really questionable or are perhaps some subliminal verisimilar assumptions attached to them ?
How far can sci~ ntific thougi., t overcome the pressure of grammatical
patterns? Whatever tbe ,;olution of these still controver.~;ial questions is, certainly there is one domain of verbal activities, where 'the
classificatory rules of the game' (Sapir 1921) acquire their highest
significance ; IN FICTION, in verbal art, LINGUISTICFICTICN.~ are fully
realized. It is qu-:te evident that grammatic'.fl concepts - or in Fortunatov's pointed nomenclature, 'formal meanings' - f i n d their
widest applica,.tion~c in poetry as the most formalized manifestation
of language. There, where the poetic function dominates ow~r the
strictly cognitive function, the latter is more or less dil:lmed, or as
Sir Philip Sidney declared in his De/eme o/Poesie, 'Now for the Poet,
he notlaing affirmeth and therefore never lieth'. Consequemly, in
Bentham's succinct formulation, 'the Fictions of the p(,et ar-~ pure
of unsincerity'.
When in the finale of Majakovskij's poem Xoro~o we read - '; ~iz,~'/
xorogd,//i ~it'/xoro~d//' (literally 'both life is good, and !t is good to
i i v e ' ) - one. will hardly look for a cognitive difference bv twee~l these
two ct.,or,:litiate clauses, but in poetic mythology the ling,list:c fiction
of the substantivized and hence hypostatized process grow: ix~to a
metonymic image of life as such, taken by it:;elf and substituted for
the living people, abstraclum pro concreto, as G alfredus de Vino Salw~,
the cunning English scholar of the early thirteenth century, say.~ in
his Poet',,,ia nova (see FarM). In contradistinction to the first ciause
with its predicative adjective of the same personifiable, feminine
gender a,s the subject, the second clause with its imperfective infinitive and with a neuter, subjectless form of the predicate, represents
a pure process without any limitation or transposition and with an
open place for the dative of agent.
The recurrent 'figure of gran'.:nar' which along with the 'figure of
sound' Gerard Manley Hopkins saw to be the constitutive principle
of verse:, iis particularly paipable in those poetic forms, where c~mtiguous m.etrical units are more or less consistently combined through

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ROMAN JAKOBSON

a gcammatical parallelism into pair,: or, optionally, triplets. Sapir's

definition quoted above is perfectly applicable to such neigh,bor
sequences: ' t h e y are really the same I,mdamental sentence, differi ag
only in their material trappings'.
There are se-eral tentative outlines devoted to different specimens
of such canoni:zal or nearly canonical paraUelism, labeled carmen
style b y J. Gonca in his monot~aph, full of interesting remarks a b o u t
'balanced binar 3- word grot'ps' in the Veda a n d also in the Nias ballads and priestly litanies. Particular attention has been paid b y
scholars to the bibl)cal paralldismus mernbrorum rooted in an archaic
Canaanite tradition and to the pervasive, continuous role of para.1telism in Chinese ver,~es and poetic: prose. A similar l:attern proves to
underlie the oral poetry of Finno-Ugric, "Iurkic, and Mongolian
peoples "['he same devices play a cardinal role in Russian folk songs
and recitatives.Z of., e.g., this typical preamL, ie of Russian hero:ic
epics (bTlfny) :
Kak vo st61 nom g6rode vo Kieve,
A u l~skova knjzja u Vladfmira,
A i b~,lo stolo'~~in'epo~6tnyj st61,
A i b3"lopirovn'e po66sta,yj p it,
A i v~$ na pirfi da napiv~.lisja,
A i v~ na pirfi da porasxv~stalis ',
~'mnyj xv~staet zolotrj kaznrj,
Glfipyj xv'~staet molod6j ~en6j.

How in the capital cit.y, in Kiev,

Under the gTacious prince, u~,der Vladimi r,
There was banqueting, an hor~.orable banquet,
There was feasting, an honorm3r feast,
Everyone in the feast ~as drunk,
Everyoue in the feast was boasting,
The clever one boasts of his golden stock,
The stupid one boasts of his young wife.

Parallelistic systems of verbal art give us a direct insight into the

;peakers' own concept:ion of the grammatical equivalences. The
analysis of various kinds of poetic license in the domain of parallelism, like the examination of riming conve:otions, m a y provide u:;
with important clues for interpreting the make-l,p of a given lan-.
gu,tge and the rank order of it:: constituents (e.g. the current
eqtt~-t.~on between the Finnish alia:five and iltative or between the
preterit ahd present against the background of ur, pairable cases or
verbal categories, according to Steinitz's observations in his p a t h breaking inquiry into parallelism in Karelian folklore;). The interaction between syntactic, morphologic and lexical e~uivalences and
z) On the present state of international research in paralleL~ tic foundations
o1 ,~itten and oral poetry see: 'Grammatic.ol ~m-alleI:Lsmand itt~ Russian facet,'
Language, 42, 1965.

POETRY

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GRAMMAR

AND

GRAMMAR

OF

POETRY

601

discreoancies, the diverse kinds of semantic contiguities, similarities,

synonynlies and antonymies, finally the different types and functions o7. tlhe allegedly 'isolated lines', all such phenomena call for a
systematic analysis indispensable to t he comprehension and interpretation o.~. the various grammatical contrivances in poetry. Such a
crucial linguistic and poetic problem as parallelism can hardly be
mastered by a scrutiny automatically restricted to the external form
an,~l excluding any discussion of grammatical and lexical meanings.
In the,. endiess travel songs of the Kola Lapps (see Xaruzin) two
juxtapo,~ed pecsons, performing identical actions, are the uniform
topic, impeUing an automatic concatenation of verses of such a pattern: 'A is sitiing on the right side of the boat; B is sitting on the
left side. A has. a paddlo in tb~ right hand ; B has a paddle in the left
hand', e~Lc.
In th.~: Russian sung or narrated folk stories of Foma and Erema
(Thoma,.,, and Jeremy), both unlucky brothers are used as a comic
motivation for a chain ol parallel clauses, parodying the carmen
style, tyl-.,ieal of Russian folk poetry and presenting quaai-differential characteristics o.~ the twe brothers by .t juxtaposition of
synonymous expressions or clt,sely coincident ~mages: 'They uncovered Erema and they found Foma; They beat Erema and they
did not pardon Foma; Erema ran away into a birch wood, and Foma
into an oak wood;' etc. (see the instructive surveys of these stories
by Aristov ar:d Adrianova-Peretc as well as their careful examination by Bogatjrev).
In the Nortt.,-Russian balla~I 'Vasilij a~,.1 Sotlj.( (see particularly
its variants puolished by Sobole~skij and Astax~v:,. and her summarizing notes) the binaET grammatical parallelism becomes the
pivot of the plot '~nd carries the '~rhole dramatic development of this
beautiful and concise byli~,a~. In t~.rms of antithetical parallelism the
initial church sceI.,e contrasts the pious invocation 'Father God !' of
the parishioners ar, d Sofija's incestuous call 'My brother Vasilij !'.
The subsequent malicious intervention of the mother introduces a
chain of distichs tying together both heroes through a strict correspondence between any line devoted to the brother and its counterpart speaking of Ns sis;ter. Some of these pairs of parallel members
in their s,tereotypec conslruction resemble the mentioned cliches of
the Lappic songs: ' ~:asil:ii was buried on the right hand, And Sofija
was buried on the left i.:and.' The interlacement of both lovers'

602

ROMAN J A K O B S O N

fates is reinforced by chiasmic constructions: 'Vasilij, drink but

,ton't give to Sofija, And Sofija, drink, don't give to Vasilij! Yet
Vasilij drank and feasted Sofija, yet Sofija drank and feasted Vasilij'.
The same function is performed by the images ,of a k i p a r i s (cypress),
tree w;th masculine name, on Sofija's grave, al:,d of a verba (willow),
with feminine name, on the adjacent grave of Vasilij : 'They wove
together with their heads,/and they stuck logether with their
l,~ave~.//' The parallel destruction of both trees 15y the mother echoes
the violent death of both siblings~ I doubt 'that efforts of such
scholars as Christine Brooke-Rose to draw a rigorous line of demaration between tropes and poetic scenery are applicable to this ballad, and in general, the range of poems and poetic trends for which
.;uch a boundary actually exist- is very limited.
According to one of Hopkins' brightest con*~ributions to poetics,
his paper of ! 865 On the Origin o / B e a u t y , such ccnonical structures as
Hebrew poetry 'paired off in parallelisms' are well-known, 'bat the
important part played by paralMism of expression in our poetry is
, l o t so well-known: I think it will surprise anyone when first pointed
cmt'. "qotwithstanding some isolated exceptions such as Berry's
recent reconnaissance, tbe role performed by the 'figure of grammar'
in world poet~" from antNuity up to the present time is still surprising for students of literature a whole century after it had
been first pointed out by Hopkins. The ancient and medieval
theory of poetry had an inkling of poetric grammar and was prone
to di~'riminate between lexical tropes and grammatical figures
(/igurae vc,~o: a ;:), "Du~.
* "'
,.ese sound rudiments were later lo,;t.
One may state that i1.,, poetry similarity is superimposed on con:ig-aity, and hence 'equivalence is promoted ~o the constitutive
device of the sequence'. Here any noticeable reiteration of the same
~7ammatical concept becomes an effective poetic device.3) Any una) See 'Linguis ics and poetics', Style in Language, ed. by T. Sebeok (New
York 1960). The grammatical structure of diverse poems from the ninth to the
twentieth centur3, has been analyzed by the present author in the following
~tudies: 'Poxvala Konstant~na Filo:~ofa Grigoriju Bogoslovu', George Flozov.
sky Festschrilt (New York, in press); [with P. Valesio] 'Vocabulorum constructi~ in Dante's so,met 'se Vedi li occhi miei',' Studi Danteschi, 43 (Florence
1966) ; 'Struktura ,lvej u srbohrvatskih pesama,' Zbornik za lilologiju i lingvisti/***, 4-5 (Novi Sax. 1961-62); 'The grammatical texture of a sonnet from Sir
Philip Sidney's 'a rcaxlia',' ,Studies ;n Language and Literature in Honour ol

POETRY

OF G R A M M A R AND G R A M M A R OF t'OE'I"RY

603

biased, attentive, :xhaustive, t(,tal description of the selection,

distribution and ivLterrelation of diverse mo::phologic~d classes and
syntactic constlaxctions in a given poem surprise,; the examiner himself by unexpected, striking symmetries and antisymmetries, balanced ,~tructures, efficient accumulation of equivalent forms and
salient contrasts, finally by rigid restrictions in the repertory of
morphological and syntactic constituents used in the poem, eliminations whicl [ on the other hand, permit us to follow the rrJ.asterly interplay of the actualized c,nstituents. Let us insist on the strikingness
of thes,~ devices; ~:ny ~ensitive reader, as Sapir woulcil say, feels instinctively the poetic effect and the semantic Ic,a~! o* these ~zrammatical[ appliance~;, 'without the slightest attempt at con~ciou~
analysis,' avd in m a n y cases the poet himself in this respect is
similar to such a reader, in the same ~vay both the t~:-aditio~:ai ii~tener and the periormer of folk poetry based on a ncz~rly col~tant
parall6iism, catche~ the deviations without, however, being c~pable
of analyzing them, as the Serbian guslars and their audience noti(:("
and ofi:en condemn any deviation from the syllabic [::,~:ttern ,)f th(:
epic songs and from the regular location of the break but do not
know how to define such a slip.
Often contrasts in the grammatical make-up su,)po~ ,~ the m(,tric~l
dixdsio~, of a poem into strophes and smaller sectio ~:;, as for insl:at~cc,
in the double trichotomy of the Hussite battle :,ong of tht' oarlv

M. Schl~mch (Warsaw 1966); Razbor tobol'skix stixov Radig(~eva,' 18 :,:k, 7

(Leningrad 1966); 'The G r a m m a t i c a l S t r u c t u r e of J a n k o Nr{ti's \:or~t.:~,'
5:bornik ]ilozo]icke] ]akulty Univerzity Komen,:kdho, 16 (Bratisla,,a 1964);
[with C. L6vi-Scrauss] 'Les Chats de Charles Baude!aire,' L'Homrne, 2 (1962) ;
' U n e microscopie du dernier Spleen dam; les ;~'leurs du Mal,' Tel O,~el. 29
(:Paris 1c,:67) ; 'S~cruktura na poslednoto Bc1 evo stihotvorenie,' Ezik i literat~tra,
16 (Sofia 1961); [with B. Casacu] 'Anal~.'se du pob~Fle Fevedere de .Mihai
E m i n e s c u , ' Cahiers de lingui~tlque thdorique et appliqude, I (Bucharest 1%2);
'Devugk~ pel~' [..k. ~q!;,k's poem], Orbis scriptz,s D. Tschizewski] zum 7,~. Geburtstag ,Mu ~'5,,zh 1966) ; [~ i~h P. Colaclides] 'Grain matical imagery in ('a',.'~:lfy's
p o e m ' ] i e m e m b e r , B o d y ' , ' Linguistics, 20 (The H a g u e 1966) : 'I)er gramnaatische Ba.u des Gedichts yon B. Brecht 'Wir sind sie',' Beitrdge zur Spvad~wissenscha/2, Volkskunde und Liwratur]orschung, IV. Steinitz davgebracht (T3erlin
1965) : ,:rid t h e papers refer,'ed to in the i!ootnotes 4 and 6. "Fhe entiro ~'hird
v o l u m e of R. Jakobson's Selected Writing:;, now in preparation, is de~'otcd t',
"Poetry of G r a m m a r and G r a m m a r of Poetr" ' '

604

ROMAN J A K O E S O N

fifteenth century, 4) or, even, they unde lie and bui!d such a stratified composition, as we observe it in /larvell's poem To his Coy
Mistress with its three tripartite paragraphs, grammatically delimited and subdivided.
The juxtaposition of com rasting grammatical concepts may be
compared with the so-calle~ 'dynamic :utting' in film montage, a
type of cutting, which, e.g., in Spottis~voode's definition, uses the
juxtaposition of contrasting shots or sequences to generate ideas in
the mind of the spectator, which these constituent shots or sequences by themselves do not carry.
Among grammatical categories utilized for parallelisms and contrast~:; we actually find all the parts ot speech both mutable aml
immutable, numbers, genders, cases, grades, tenses, aspects, moods,

_,t___
voice:3,
,. . 1, ~. . . .e . -q O ~ ~ao~u~ct
and concrete words, animates and inanimates, a.ppellatives and proper names, affirmatives and negatives,
finite and infinite verbal forms, definite and indefinite pronouns or
articles, and diverse syntactic elements and constructions.
The Russian writer Veresaev c'nfesse:l in his intimate notes that
sometimes he felt as if imagery were '.,. mere counterfeit of genuine
poetry'. As a nile, in imageless poems it is the 'figure of g r a m mar' which dominates and which supplants the tropes. Both the
Hussite battle song and Pu~kin's lyrics as 'Ja vas/4ubil' are eloquent
examples of such a monopoly of grammatical devices. Much more
usual, however, is an intensive interplay of both elements, as for
instance, in Pu~kin's stanzas 'Cto v imeni tebe moem', manifestly
contrasting with his cited composition .vlthout images,' both being
written in the same year and probably dedicated to the same ad~re.,see, Karoi[ina Sobaflska. 5) The imaginative, metaphoric vehicles
of a poem may be opposed to its matter-of-fact level by a sharp
concomitant contrast of their grammatical constituents, as we obnerve ~t, for example, in the Polish concise meditations of Cyprian
Norwid, one of the greatest world poets of the later nineteenth
century.n)
4) See 'Kto~- jsfi bo~i bojovnici, 'International Journal o/Slavic Lingu, istics

and Poetics, 7, 1963.

z} CI. the comparative scrutiny of these two Pugkin's poems in the Russian
paper referred to in the footnote 1.
6) See 'Przeszh ~ ' C)qgriana Norwida,' Pamiftnik literacki, 54, (Warsaw
t963).

POETRY

OF G R A M M A R

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GRAMMAR

OF P O E T R Y

605

The obligatory character of the grammatical processes and concepts constrains the poet to reckon with them; eiffer he is striving
for symmetry and sticks to these simple, repeatable, diaphanous
patterns, based on a binary principle, or he may cope with them,
when longing for an 'organic chaos'. I stated repeatedly that the
rhyme technique is 'either grammatical or antigrammatical' but
never agrammatical, and the same may be applied as well to pcets'
grammar in general. There is in this i espect a remarkable analogy
between the role c,f grammar in poetry and the painter's composition
based on a latent or patent geometrical order or on a revulsion
against geomelrical arrangements. For the figurative arts g,eometrical principles represent a 'beautiful necessity,' accordi,g to the
designation taken over by Bragd,-.~. from Emerson. It is the same
necessity which in language marks out the grammatical meanings. 7)
The correspondence between the two fields which aheadv in the
thirteen::h century was pointed out by Robert Kilwardby (see
Wallerand, p. 46) and which prompted Spinoza to try.at grammar
more geometrico, has emerged in a linguistic study by Benjamin Lee
Whorl, ' L a n g u a g e , Mind and Reality' published sholtly after his
death: Madras, 1942. The author discusses the abstract 'designs of
sentence structure' as opposed to 'individual sentence.,~' and to the
vocal:ul~ry, which is a 'somewhat rudimcntary and not s?lf-stlfficient paX' of the linguistic order, and envisages 'a "geometry' ~f
form principles characteristic of each language'. A further comparison between gramma: and geometry was outlined in Stalin's pdemics of 1950 against Marr's linguistic Mas: the distinctive property
of grammar lies in its abstractive power; 'abstracting itself from
anything that is pxrticular and concrete in words and sentences,
gramma,," treats only the general pattern, underlying the word,'hanges and the combination of words into sentences, and builds in
,;ueh a way grammatical rules and laws . . . In this respect grammar
bears a resemblance to geometry, which, when giving its law.~;, abstracts itself from concrete objects, treats objects as bodies deprived
of concreteness and defines thei~ muO~.M relations not as concrct~.
relations of certain concrete objects c u t as relations of bodies in

7) Cf. ~t Jakobson, 'Boas' view of gram-natit ~dmeaning, 'American .4 nthropologist, 61, 5, part 2, Memoir 89, 1959.

606

ROMAN JAKOBSON

general, namely, ~elations deprived of any concreteness.' s) The

abstractive power of human thought, underlying - in the views of
the two quoted authors - both geometrical relations and grammar,
.~uperimposes simple geometrical and grammatical figures upon the
pictorial word of particular objects and upon the concrete lexical
'wherewithal' of the verbal art, as it was shrewdly realized in the
thirteenth century by Villard de Honnecourt for graphic arts and by
Galfredu.~ for poetry.
The pivotal role, performed in the grammatical texture of poe+:ry
bv (iiverse kinds of pronouns, is due to the fact that pronouns, in
contradistinction to all other autonomous words, are purely grammatical, relational units, and besides substantival and adiectival
pror~ouns we must include in this class also adverbial pronouns and
the ,+o-called substantive (rather oronominal) w~hs ~,,~h as to be ~-'~
1o h(,:ve. The relation of pronouns to non-pronominal words has been
repeate(tly compared wit.h the relation between geometrical and
l,by+dca] bodies (see, e.g., Zareckij).
B.:side coramon or wide.~;pread devices the grammatical texture c +.
[.umtry offers many salier~t differential features, typical of a given
pat]ma] literature or of a limited period, a specific trend, an indivi(!ua poet or ,even one single work. The thirteentb century students
of a~ts whose names we have quoted remind us of the extraordinary
compositional sense and skill of the Gothic epoch and ilelp us to
inte-pret the impressive structure of the Hussite battle song ' K t o ~
i~fi ~:4.i bojovnici'. We deliberately dwell on this incentive revolutionary poem almost free of tropes, far from decorativeness and
rnainerism. 1"he grammatical structure of this work reveals a
pan icularly elaborate ar::iculation.
A~ shown by the analysis of the song (see footnote 4), its three
stro)hes in turn display a trinitarian form: they are divided into
thr~ ~ smaller strophic unit.,; - membra. Each of the three strophes
exh b:~ts its specific grammatical features which we labeled 'vertical
simi !arities'. Each of the three membra throughout the three strophes
8) As V. A. ;,'vegin:ev brought to my attention, Stalin's confrontation of
gran mar with geometry was prompted by the views of V. Bogorodickij, an
outs a~ding disciple cf the young Baudouin de Courtenay and M. Kruszewski.

POETRY

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AND

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OF POETRY

607

h.s its pa,rticular properties, termed 'horizontal similariti~;' and

distinguMdng any given membrum in the strophe fr~ir, i~:s two other
membra. The initial and the final membra of the .~,ong are linked
together with its central membrum (the second membrum of the second stro, phe) and differ trom the rest of the membra by special
features, enabling us to connect these three membra through a 'falling
diagonal', in contradistinction to the 'rising diagonal' linking the
central membrum of the song with the final raembru~: of the initial
strophe and with the initial rr.embrum of the final strophe. Furthermore, noticeable similarities bring together (and separate fr(ml the
rest of the song) the initial membra of the first and bird .~trophes
with the second membrum of the second strophe, an~, on the other
hand, the second membra of the first and third stro?hes with t~e
third membrum of the second strophe. The fo__rm_erdisposition may be
labeled 'initial upright arc', because it involves initial vnembra, while
the tatter, iavolving a final membru,m, will be called 'final ~.~pright
arc'. There appear, moreover, the 'inverted arcs', likewise grammatically d(limited, an 'initial' one, uniting the initial ~rembra of
the first and last strophes, with the central membrum oi tnc .~t-c,,r,l
strophe, and a 'final inverted arc', tying the central ~nemb~/a of the
first and last strophe.~' with the final mernbrum of the second strophe.
This steadfast membnflcatJ, n a,.d congruou.~ ac'~r.,,,.t~i( itv must
be viewed against the background of Gothic art and ,~,.h,,~.,. *;~;,.,-~
convincingl. 3 compared by Erwin Panofskv. In its sla0pe the Czech
song of the early fifteenth century approximates the authoritative
precepts of the 'classic S u m m a with its three requirements of (1)
totality (sutficient enumeration), (2) arrangement according to a
system of homologous parts and parts of parts (sufficient articulation), and (~;) distinctness and deductive cogency (sufficient interrelation).' However immense the difference is between Thomism and
t]he ideoiogy c* the anonymous author of Zisskiana cantio, the shape
of this song totally satisfies the artistic request of Thomas Aquinas"
'the senses delight in things duty proportioned as in something akin
to them; for, the sense, too, is a kind of reason as is ever?" cognitive
power.' The grammatical texture of the Hussite chorale corresponds
to the compositional principles of Czech contemporaneous I~ainting.
In his monograph about the pictorial art of the ttm~si~te epoch,
Kropgt~ek analyzes the style of the early fifteenth century an'i points
out a conglq.lotts and systematic articulation of the surface, a strict
'

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ROMAN J A K O B S O N

subordination of the individual parts to the total compositional

t;~sks and a deliberate use of contrasts.
The Czech example helps us to glance into the intricacy of corresp)ndences between the functions of grammar in poetry and of re1~tional geometPy in painting. We are faced ~ t h the phenomenologic d problem of an intrinsic kinship between both factors and with a
c mcrete historical search for convergent development and for intera,:tion between verbal and representational art. Furthermore, in the
quest for a delineation of artistic trends and traditions, the analysis
of grammatical texture provides us with important clues, mad,
f n~dly, ~.~: approach the vital question, how a poetic work exploits
the exta~t ~nventory of masterly devices for a new end and ree valuates them iin the light of their novel tasks. Thus, for instance,
t i~le mast,- piece of Hussite revolutionary poetry has inherited from
the opulent Gothic stock both kinds of grammatical parallelism, in
I lopkins' parlance 'comparison for likeness' and 'comparison for unlikeness', and we have to investigate how the combination of these
t wo, mainly grammatical ways of proceeding enabled the poet to
~chieve a coherent, convincing, effective transition from the initial
spiritual through the belligerent argumentation of ~:he second strot~h,e to the military orders and battle cries of the finale, or - in other
word s - how the poetic delight in verbal structures duly proportioned
grows into a preceptive power leading to a direct action.

J:tazvard University,
Boylston Hall 3oz, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.

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