Are both of these sentences parallelism/parallel structure? Please explain.

Question

A. To wander about like vagabonds from land to land, to rob the poor, to betray the confiding, to murder in cold blood the defenseless.

B. I am king in my own land, and will never become the vassal of a mortal like myself.

My teacher said both of these sentences have parallel structure, but I don’t get how is the second sentence has the parallel structure. I mean there is the word “and,” but both halves of the sentence does not have the same style. Is my teacher correct or I am correct? Please help by explaining it clearly.

Answer 1

I would say that your teacher *could* present a case in which the second sentence is structurally parallel, but it's certainly not as strong or rhetorically obvious.

The second sentence is parallel at the level of grammatical parts, but not at the level of phrases.

"I am king in my own land" is structured as: [subject (I)] [verb (am)] [subjective complement (king)] [prepositional phrase (in my own land)]

"will never become vassal of a mortal like myself" is structured as: [verb (will never become)] [subjective complement (vassal)] [prepositional phrase (of a mortal like myself)].

It's a quite messy parallelism because the modifiers of "land" come before it ("my own") and the modifiers of "mortal" come after ("like myself"), so I can see why you disagree with the teacher!