An analysis of poetic syntax with special reference to Stockenström’s The Wisdom of Water (2007)

Poetry, by its very nature, is different to prose. Through ostranenie, the poet tries to foreground his or her message (meaning). Ostranenie is defined as follows: ‘A neologism, it implies two kinds of action: making strange, and pushing aside. Consistent with this double meaning, the concept refers to the techniques writers use to transform ordinary language into poetic language’ (www.oxfordreference.com). Gräbe (1997: 25) states: ‘The recognition of a difference between ordinary or normal language on the one hand, and “unusual” or “different” language use on the other hand is dependent upon the distinction […] between “automatisation” and “foregrounding.”’ This study will look at poetry, specifically that of Wilma Stockenström in The Wisdom of Water (2007), through the lens of syntax.The aim of this study is to determine the unique contribution of syntactic strategies for analysing and interpreting poetry and how they aid the poet in foregrounding his or her intended meaning. The strategies investigated are those detailed by Ina Gräbe in Syntax in Poetry (1997), namely the violation of grammatical rules in poetic language (specifically displacement, deletion and selectional deviation), the exploitation of forms of repetition in syntactic pattern formation (specifically coupling, parallelism and elaboration) and finally syntactic units and typographic demarcations (specifically the relationship between sentence and line and, the relationship between sentence and stanza). Through qualitative analysis, this study performs a syntactical structure analysis of Stockenström’s poetry in The Wisdom of Water (2007) and shows how the use and effect of Gräbe’s syntactic strategies can foreground a poet’s intended meaning. It will further show the way in which such a linguistic analysis can provide insight into the poet’s meaning, that might not otherwise have been apparent to a reader