A Stylistic Approach to Thomas Campion’s There Is a Garden in Her Face
A Stylistic Approach to Thomas Campion’s There Is a Garden in Her Face

Summary/Abstract: Literary works come into existence through authors’ use of language units in particular ways. Style is considered as the choice of linguistic characteristics from all the probabilities in language. Stylistics attempts to create an interaction of readers with the language of a literary text to clarify how a reader understands the text. This study examines how Thomas Campion manipulated basic linguistic features to form stylistic effects in order to produce meaning in There Is a Garden in Her Face. The analysis involves lexical, semantic, grammatical (syntactic), graphological, and phonological (sound pattern) levels. It helps to clarify the context of the poem. The stylistic analysis shows that the poem is very carefully constructed. All three stanzas in the poem are grammatically parallel to each other and deal with the lady’s beauty whose face is compared to a garden of heavenly paradise where every kind of delicious fruit grows there. The unity of the poem is secured by the refrain describing a beautiful lady’s lips. The graphological deviation shows a system of capitalization to foreground important words such as “Roses” and “white Lilies” in the poem to represent love/passion, and innocence/purity. The phonetic parallelism reinforces the system of parallel meaning in terms of alliteration and assonance. The poem is based mostly on similes and metaphors to make the imagery of the flowers and fruit growing in a garden much more vivid. With this, the lady’s physical features are portrayed. The noun cherry is used with the adjective sacred which portrays that the lady’s lips have not been touched or kissed by anyone. The same line which is repeated at the end of each stanza foregrounds that this beautiful lady is unattainable unless if she says her lips are fully ripe to become most valuable. Here, female beauty signals the ideals of Elizabethan beauty: white skin, blushing cheeks, and red lips. This study shows how Campion has been able to manipulate language which is an integral part of a literary work. Campion has created changes through a systemic use of language to get his message across to readers. This study may help researchers understand how Campion used stylistic tools in his poem.

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