A Stylistic Study on the Selected Poems of Rupi Kaur’s “Milk and Honey”

Abstract

The emergence of cyberspace and digital means of communicating has resulted in the flourishing of writers who became famous by publishing their literary works online. One of the successful writers with this humble beginning is Rupi Kaur whose style is subjectively described as bizarre, peculiar, an illusion of profoundness, lacks nuance, and unconventional.  To avoid jeopardizing the aesthetics and genuine meaning of her poetry, this research aims to explore the objective analysis and interpretation of her 12 micro poems selected from her book “Milk and Honey”. It specifically seeks to stylistically investigate the presence of foregrounded parts found in her poems and their linguistic forms. The obtained verbal data are analyzed through the lens of Geoffrey Leech’s foregrounding theory which focuses on deviation and parallelism. The study reveals that the foregrounded parts in terms of deviation are enjambment, omission of syllable sounds, hyperbaton, the personification of abstract nouns, and metaphorization which are linguistically categorized as graphological, phonological, grammatical, and semantic. In terms of parallelism, they are the repetition of sounds, lexeme, words, and phrases manifested through anadiplosis, epanalepsis, epistrophe, anaphora, and conduplicatio which are lexical, phonological, and syntactic. The foregrounded parts relay Kaur’s message on the importance of equalness among gender and women's empowerment as she retains her sense of heritage, and culture very evident from the interdependence of various semiotic modes that she used in her poetry. It is recommended that the objectivity of literary analysis and interpretation should be discussed intensively for the awareness of language/literature teachers and learners.