EXPLORING TRANSITIVITY IN POETRY: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE TYGER AND THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Abstract

This paper explores how grammatical decisions in Robert Frost's  “The Road Not Taken” (1916) and William Blake’s “The Tyger”(1794)  create the image of the human agent and the divine creator in the form of the systemic functional linguistics, specifically in the System of Transitivity. Past research has shown that transitivity patterns in poetry reveal other experiential meanings, ideologies and character psychologies; the study treats every clause as a unit of experience and categorises it into material, mental, relational, verbal, behavioural or existential processes, along with the respective participants and situations. The research follows a qualitative-quantitative, approach for the transitivity analyses of poems . Two canonical poems came to be chosen by means of purposive sampling because they thematise decision, selfhood and creation in different epochs of literature and with various philosophical leanings. Quantitative outcomes reveal that Frost has a higher percentage of mental and relational processes, foreshadows the speaker as Senser and Carrier deliberating and self-defining, where Blake is preoccupied by interrogative content and relational clauses that create a fear-inducing and partly hidden Actor/ identifier behind the creation of the Tyger. These trends affirm that transitivity is an influential tool to connect linguistic form and meanings about choice, uncertainty, and theological awe. It has a contribution to literary stylistics and SFL since it provides a grammatical, clause-by-clause, comparison between Romantic and Modernist poems, showing how the different ways of doing and sensing are grammatically constituted to produce the difference between an internal existential journey and a cosmic creation storey.