Personal Relationship in Les Murray’s Poem

Abstract

Stylistics is a linguistic analysis on literary and non-literary texts. This article is concerned with a systemic stylistic analysis on a poem in terms of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Verbal Art Semiotics. It uses library research, qualitative data, documentary study, descriptive method and intrinsic-objective approach. The semantic analysis results in both automatized and foregrounded meanings. Then the automatized meaning produces lexical cohesion and in turn, it produces subject matter. Meanwhile, the foregrounded meaning produces the literary meaning and in turn, it creates theme. Finally, the analysis indicates that the subject matter is about daily works, the literary meaning is about the complete severance and the theme is about personal relationship.