Repetition and semantic fields in Hando Runnel’s poetry cycle “Beautiful Land”
Keywords: Hando Runnel, poetry cycle “Beautiful Land”, figures of repetition, semantic field, parallelism, allegory
Repetition is a central device in Runnel’s poetics, and his poems often feature a dense network of interwoven sound, word and line repetitions. This article aims to analyze the function of figures of repetition in the poetry cycle Ilus maa (“Beautiful Land”) and to describe their role in the formation of semantic relationships within the cycle. The central research question concerns the role of repetition in shaping the semantic fields of the cycle as a whole and of individual poems. Drawing on structuralist poetics and theoretical approaches to figures of repetition, the article proceeds from the premise that recurring units create poetic self-reference and shape the semantic field of the text through equivalence and correlation. The cycle is analyzed through close reading, interpreting the formal and semantic functions of repetitive details and the interplay between different types of repetition.
In Ilus maa, repetition functions not merely as a sonic embellishment but as a formal-semantic system. Regular repetitions of words and lines link individual poems into a coherent cycle, create parallelism, and shape the emotional and allegorical semantic fields of the poems. Repetitions condense and expand their initial meanings; the same words and lines acquire additional shades of meaning in new textual contexts. The formal-semantic function of repetition is most pronounced in the cycle’s refrain and in the poems Me liigume (“We Are Moving”), Vana laul (“An Old Song”) and Päike on kõikide päralt (“The Sun Belongs to Everyone”), where the network of repetitive devices binds the motifs of the homeland, hope, danger and the future into a unified allegorical whole.
Kai Karell-Narrusk (b. 1988), Doctoral Student in Estonian literature at the Institute of Cultural Research, University of Tartu; Junior Research Fellow in Didactics (Ülikooli 16, 51003 Tartu), kai.karell-narrusk@ut.ee
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Runnel 2024 = Eravestlus Hando Runneliga 1. IV.
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