Foregrounding and Metaphor: A Stylistic Study on Hamza Yusuf’s Religious Poems

Abstract

Poetry not only communicates information but also arouses the readers’ feeling to a thoughtful sense and the life’s perception of the author through parable objects. Poetry could be perceptually prominent if it is expressed through linguistic deviation, which further defined as “foregrounding”. This article is an attempt to provide understandings from the analysis of Shaykh Hamza Yusuf’s religious poems that engage both semantic and sound patterns (phonological) analyses. The semantic level of the poems dealt with metaphorical analysis as realized in several lines that observed the foregrounded words, phrase and sentences which are semantically deviant, and are classifiable into personification and depersonification. At the phonological level, the sounds patterns cover the use of certain sounds found on major lines of both poems, the distribution of similar sound patterns can produce the aesthetic effects, the common observed styles found in Hamza Yusuf’s religious poems are the repetitions or anaphora, assonance, alliteration, rhythmic sounds of the beginning, in- and end rhymes, and the middle rhyme.