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
