Miton's Parallels

Lycidas

by John Milton, 1637

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more,
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forced fingers rude
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear,
Compels me to disturb your season due;
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.
Who would not sing for Lycidas?
He knew Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.
He must not float upon his wat'ry bier
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of some melodious tear.
.....

-An excerpt from Milton's elegy of the drowning of a Cambridge schoolmate and friend.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/lycidas/

Why Parallel?

The structure of a poem, its craft, alliteration, assonance, meter and emotion all have architectural relevance. The sadness of the poem, despite of Samual Johnson's opinion, rubs off on us. Lycidas, like all good poems, needs us in order to be, in order come alive when someone reads them. Just like warm coals glow bright and deep under the below's gust, a good poem allows us to precieve within them a world of our own; a world different from the author who created it, a world which can change and flutter with in our personal indisyncracies.

Good poems, like good buildings make us feel, think and question our existence. Why do we die, why do we grieve, why am I here? They are spatial, have corpreal presence, are metaphysical and are economical. For me, parallel means non-direct, non-frontal, tandem relationships.

Good poems have parallels.

This of course also calls into question what is 'good'.

Parallel Definitions

The word Parallel, by definition, is contradictory and complex. Fundamental to it, is an oddly unquantifiable, spatially related near-simultaneity: two elements existing in related locations, never crossing or intersecting, but also never deviating from their perceived relational existence.

In order to BE parallel, there must first be a perceived relationship or a connection. A parallel relationship often assumes that one parallel object shares characteristics or traits with the other parallel object(s). This parallel condition has the tendency to "rub off" characteristics between the objects.

Being parallel requires at least two; there can never be a parallel of one. However within this relationship of two, there are limits of its two-ness. Because two parallel objects or conditions perceived as "too" separated, too far apart that they no longer are understood as related, are no longer really parallel, even if in fact at some distant scale they are. However, where this boundary lies is undefined and relative to the perceiver. Furthermore, nothing in the parallel definition states that two parallel objects/ideas can't change the relational "distance" between them. Mathematically speaking, two parallel lines that are at one moment 1" apart and the next moment 2" apart, are still parallel. Nor do both of these lines have to be the same in thickness, height, outline or texture or even constant state. Both lines don't even have to be of the same time. Similar lines, say 3 minutes a part, can be parallel.

The parallel condition also requires direction. For example: 2 circles side by side are not parallel. Their form and proximity suggests that they have relationship to each other but, because of their non-directional nature, they are parallel. 4 circles, equa-distance apart, again are not first and foremost parallel. They are a grid, they are a pattern but not necessarily parallel. However 6 circles, in two rows, equa-distance from the circles adjacent to it, are parallel. Technically speaking the previous examples given were all parallel, or at least have parallel qualities, but because of their form (circles), their other more dominant characteristics took precedent, smothering the parallel and making it unrecognizable. Does this mean that the 'parallel' of the first two examples goes away?- no...well maybe.

Parallels

Parallel:

adj.

1. Being an equal distance apart everywhere: dancers in two parallel rows.


2. Mathematics
   a. Of, relating to, or designating two or more straight coplanar lines that do not intersect.
   b. Of, relating to, or designating two or more planes that do not intersect.
   c. Of, relating to, or designating a line and a plane that do not intersect.
   d. Of, relating to, or designating curves or surfaces everywhere equidistant.
3. Having comparable parts, analogous aspects, or readily recognized similarities: the parallel lives of two contemporaries.
   b. Having the same tendency or direction: parallel motives and aims.
4. Grammar: having identical or equivalent syntactic constructions in corresponding clauses or phrases.
5. Music:
   a. Moving in the same direction at a fixed interval: parallel motion; parallel fifths.
   b. Having the same tonic. Used of scales and keys: C minor is the parallel minor scale of C major.
6. Electronics: denoting a circuit or part of a circuit connected in parallel.
7. Computer Science
   a. Of or relating to the simultaneous transmission of all the bits of a byte over separate wires: a parallel port; a parallel interface.
   b. Of or relating to the simultaneous performance of multiple operations: parallel processing.

adv.

In a parallel relationship or manner: a road and a railway that run parallel.

n.

1. Mathematics: one of a set of parallel geometric figures, such as lines or planes.
2. One that closely resembles or is analogous to another: a unique event, without parallel in history.
   b. A comparison indicating likeness; an analogy.
3. The condition of being parallel; near similarity or exact agreement in particulars; parallelism.
4. Any of the imaginary lines representing degrees of latitude that encircle the earth parallel to the plane of the equator.
5. Printing: a sign indicating material referred to in a note or reference.
6. Electronics: an arrangement of components in a circuit that splits the current into two or more paths. Used chiefly in the phrase in parallel.

tr.v. par·al·leled also par·al·lelled, par·al·lel·ing also par·al·lel·ling, par·al·lels also par·al·lels

1. To make or place parallel to something else: paralleled the ditch to the highway
2. To be or extend parallel to: a trail that parallels the crater rim.
3. To be similar or analogous to: claimed that fetal development parallels the evolution of the species.
4. To be or provide an equal for; match.
5. To show to be analogous; compare or liken: critics who have paralleled the novel's plot to an ancient myth.

[Latin paralllus, from Greek paralllos : para-, beside; see para-1 + allln, of one another (from allos, other; see al-1 in Indo-European roots).]

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2003. Published by

Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.