IV
Perhaps Macpherson's most important innovation was to cast his work into what his contemporaries called "measured prose," and it was recognized early that this new form contributed greatly to their appeal. In discussing the Fragments, Ramsey of Ochtertyre commented,
"Nothing could be more happy or judicious than his translating in measured prose; for had he attempted it in verse, much of the spirit of the original would have evaporated, supposing him to have had talents and industry to perform that very arduous task upon a great scale. This small publication drew the attention of the literary world to a new species of poetry."[12]
For his new species of poetry Macpherson drew upon the stylistic techniques of the King James Version of the Bible, just as Blake and Whitman were to do later. As Bishop Lowth was the first to point out, parallelism is the basic structural technique. Macpherson incorporated two principal forms of parallelism in his poems: repetition, a pattern in which the second line nearly restates the sense of the first, and completion in which the second line picks up part of the sense of the first line and adds to it. These are both common in the Fragments, but a few examples may be useful. I have rearranged the following lines and in the other passages relating to the structure of the poems in order to call attention to the binary quality of Macpherson's verse:
Repetition
Who can reach the source of thy race, O Connal?
And who recount thy Fathers? ("Fragment V")
Oscur my son came down;
The mighty in battle descended. ("Fragment VI")
Oscur stood forth to meet him;
My son would meet the foe. ("Fragment VIII")
Future times shall hear of thee;
They shall hear of the fallen Morar. ("Fragment XII")
Completion