What voice is that I hear?
That voice like the summer wind. ("Fragment I")
The warriours saw her, and loved;
Their souls were fixed on the maid.
Each loved her, as his fame;
Each must possess her or die.
But her soul was fixed on Oscur;
My son was the youth of her love. ("Fragment VII")
Macpherson also used grammatical parallelism as a structural device; a series of simple sentences is often used to describe a landscape:
Autumn is dark on the mountains;
Grey mist rests on the hills.
The whirlwind is heard on the heath.
Dark rolls the river through the narrow plain. ("Fragment V")
The poems also have a discernible rhythmical pattern; the tendency of the lines to form pairs is obvious enough when there is semantic or grammatical parallelism, but there is a general binary pattern throughout. Typically, the first unit is a simple sentence, the second almost any grammatical structure—an appositive, a prepositional phrase, a participle, the second element of a compound verb, a dependent clause. A simile—in grammatical terms, an adverbial phrase—sometimes constitutes the second element. These pairs are often balanced roughly by the presence of two, three, or four accents in each constituent; there are a large number of imbedded iambic and anapestic feet, which give the rhythm an ascending quality:
The da/ughter of R/inval was n/ear;
Crim/ora, br/ight in the arm/our of m/an;
Her ha/ir loose beh/ind,
Her b/ow in her h/and.
She f/ollowed the y/outh to w/ar,
Co/nnal her m/uch bel/oved.
She dr/ew the st/ring on D/argo;
But e/rring pi/erced her C/onnal. ("Fragment V")
As E. H. W. Meyerstein pointed out, "Macpherson can, without extravagance, be regarded as the main originator (after the translators of the Authorized Version) of what's known as 'free verse."[13] Macpherson's work certainly served to stimulate prosodic experimentation during the next half century; it is certainly no coincidence that two of the boldest innovators, Blake and Coleridge, were admirers of Macpherson's work.
Macpherson's diction must have also appealed to the growing taste for poetry that was less ornate and studied. His practice was to use a large number of concrete monosyllabic words of Anglo-Saxon origin to describe objects and forces common to rural life. A simple listing of the common nouns from the opening of "Fragment I" will serve to illustrate this tendency: love, son, hill, deer, dogs, bow-string, wind, stream, rushes, mist, oak, friends. Such diction bears an obvious kinship to what was to become the staple diction of the romantic lyric; for example, a similar listing from "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" would be this: slumber, spirit, fears, thing, touch, years, motion, force, course, rocks, stones, trees.
The untamed power of Macpherson's wild natural settings is also striking. Samuel H. Monk has made the point well:
"Ossian's strange exotic wildness and his obscure, terrible glimpses of scenery were in essence something quite new.... Ossian's images were far from "nature methodized." His imagination illumined fitfully a scene of mountains and blasted heaths, as artificially wild as his heroines were artificially sensitive; to modern readers they resemble too much the stage-settings of melodrama. But in 1760, his descriptions carried with them the thrill of the genuine and of naïvely archaic."
And Monk adds, "imperceptibly the Ossianic poems contributed toward converting Britons, nay, Europeans, into enthusiastic admirers of nature in her wilder moments."[14]