"Word upon a Word": Parallelism, Meaning, and Emergent Structure in Kalevala-meter Poetry

Henrik Gabriel Porthan, the Professor of Eloquence at the Academy of Turku in Finland, was one of the first scholars to describe the nature and effect of parallelism in Finnish vernacular poetry. In 1766 he designated these poems sung in a meter used widely in Baltic-Finnic languages as Runis nostris ("our poems") (Porthan 1867:320). The appropriation of this multiethnic poetic tradition culminated in the publication of Elias Lönnrot's Kalevala (1835 and 1849), the national epic of Finland that he created by using the Runis nostris, or oral poems collected in Finland, Karelia, and Ingria, as his sources. Since Lönnrot, the meter became known, somewhat anachronistically, as the Kalevala-meter. Porthan (1867:323) described parallelism as rhythmus sensus, a harmonious structuring of meaning, or of "thoughts and notions" in poetry. This harmonious configuration which he called rime du sens ("rhyme of sense") had an impact on the aesthetics and expressive efficacy of the poem (323) It lent these poems "a kind of sumptuousness, and altogether splendid vigor. The mind of the reader or listener is certainly affected more intensely, when it is as if hammered repeatedly" (320).¹ Adding to this performative and affective momentum, parallelism results in a cumulative string of ideas that is simultaneously precise and verbose (320):

[A]n idea is not only expressed with a simple clause but also presented and highlighted with two or, if needed, even more lines, so that the phrasing in each is different […]. And when the idea of the first line is finalized by repetition, it is linked to another, which is similarly repeated, and so on.

As Porthan noted (325), each line must contain a "complete idea or part of a clause"—"The idea may never end otherwise than together with the line, and a word belonging to the idea cannot be transferred to the next line." Because enjambment was undesirable, it was the flexible patterning of parallelism that made the poem a cohesive continuum, binding the lines to each other and eventually into a longer sequence. The serial structure only appears to be mechanical (Porthan 1867:320): "In this way, the whole poem rises as a continuous series of figures."² Porthan chooses the Latin verb insurgo, ("to rise up," "gather force," or "increase") to point to the emergence of a poem as a powerful movement with an orientation—an ascension. This process does not result in a mechanical and repetitive serial structure but one that is striving towards finalization, climax, and impact.

In this essay I employ the notion of parallelism as a methodological tool in an analysis of the meanings conveyed in short forms of folklore in the Kalevala-meter: proverbs, aphorisms, and lyric poetry. Drawing from Roman Jakobson's (1987a and 1987c) treatment of the poetic function, I use the term paradigm or paradigmatic axis (or selection) to point to the dimension of semantically related components out of which the singer selects the suitable word to fill in the slots in the parallel line. The syntagmatic axis (or combination) is the realized continuum of words constituting the utterance, or line, and eventually the whole poetic composition.³ In his theorem of the poetic function, Jakobson defines communication dominated by the poetic function as something intrinsically parallelistic. The famous thesis "The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination" (Jakobson 1987a:71 and Jakobson 1987c:127; emphasis original) means that the axis of similarity or equivalence that orders the paradigmatic set is the major principle in the construction of poetic utterances on the syntagmatic level. Evelyn Waugh (1985:150) describes texts dominated by poetic function: "The verbal material displays overall a hierarchical structure of symmetries, based on repetitions, regularities, and systematizations of various kinds." These symmetries are, at their core, different kinds of parallelisms.

In the interpretation of the poems below, I pay special attention to the paradigms, that is to say, the sets of eligible words and expressions in the construction of poetic lines and longer poetic compositions. The selection of the words actually used is not...