What is foregrounded by its deviation, parallelism, repetition in this novel?

What is foregrounded by its deviation, parallelism, repetition – what poetic features/ devices/ techniques are there?





Oscar Wilde's novel the Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 1 – ‘the studio was filled with the rich odour of roses’.





The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.





From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.





In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.

What is foregrounded by its deviation, parallelism, repetition in this novel?
lots of alliteration, eg 'rich odor of roses', 'bear the burden of a beauty', and 'flight flitted'





repetition 'honey-sweet and honey-colored'





personification - eg of the laburnum- it is give human qualities such as bearing a burden. Also personification of silk curtains, being stretched, and the bees shouldering.





similes 'dim roar of London was like...'





lots of hyphenated words, draws attention to description.





the day seems boring, and this is created by using words from the semantic field of boring, stifling and endless, as though the day is dragging on. e.g. monotonous, straggling, innumerable, immobile, sullen, oppressive.





Also, there is much attention payed to describing the surroundings, unlike the rest of the book which i mostly based around speech and the paradoxes of Lord Henry Wotton. The use of visual(how it looks), auditory(sound), olfactory(smell) imagery shows how boring the time is because it draws attention to the surroundings, and we, like Lord Henry Wotton are waiting for something to happen





There is some deviation from the normal construction of sentence (e.g. smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes...as opposed to - smoking innumerable cigarettes, as was his custom.). Construing the sentence as it was, Wilde ensured that the word innumerable was fore fronted, emphasizing how the day is dragging on, and how Lord Henry Wotton is a chimney.

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