PATTERNS OF PARALLELISM AS TROPE OF MEANING IN OSUNDARE'S POETRY

Creative words arrangements and their meaning possibilities animate Osundare as a poet. One of the ways in which this is established is the obtrusive deployment of the stylistic device of parallelism found in his poetry. There is an effect of grace and impact of meaning to be felt in Osundare’s poetry as licensed by the poet’s construction of parallelism. This device only enjoys a passing mention in Osundare criticisms and this has tended to undermine an important dimension of meaning in his literary corpus. In this paper I provide a stylistic analysis of the device as a style-marker in Osundare’s poetry, focusing on its patterns and exploring how meaning is encoded and delivered.