When we think about sentences, most of us tend to think about prose. What’s the difference between a sentence in prose and a sentence in poetry? As a way to begin thinking about this question, let’s look at some samples from Walt Whitman’s writing. First, here’s a prose extract from his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass:
Who knows the
curious mystery of the eyesight? The other senses corroborate themselves, but
this is removed from any proof but its own and foreruns the identities of the
spiritual world. A single glance of it mocks all the investigations of man and
all the instruments and books of the earth and all reasoning. What is
marvelous? what is unlikely? what is impossible or baseless or vague? after you
have once just opened the space of a peachpit and given audience to far and
near and to the sunset and had all things enter with electric swiftness softly
and duly without confusion or jostling or jam.
On
the surface, the language in this excerpt is almost stereotypically poetic.
Whitman’s word choice is varied and memorable; the sentences float smoothly off
the tongue; he uses rhetorical devices such as the repetition of questions to
intensify the musicality of the passage. So let’s try breaking the sentences
into the long, dense lines typical of a Whitman poem. What has changed in your
reaction to this passage now that I’ve transformed it from a block of prose
into a series of sentences in lines?
Who knows the curious mystery of
the eyesight?
The other senses corroborate
themselves, but this is removed from any proof
but its own and
foreruns the identities of the spiritual world.
A single glance of it mocks all the
investigations of man and all the instruments
and books of the
earth and all reasoning.
What is marvelous? what is
unlikely? what is impossible or baseless or vague?
after you have
once just opened the space of a peachpit and given audience
to far and near and to the sunset
and had all things enter with electric
swiftness softly and duly without
confusion or jostling or jam.
While you’re still
thinking about the previous sentence experiment, let’s look at a passage from
an actual Whitman poem and start drawing some comparisons. Here’s the opening
of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:
Flood-tide below me! I see you face
to face!
Clouds of the west—sun there half
an hour high—I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in
the usual costumes, how curious
you are to me!
you are to me!
On the ferry-boats the hundreds and
hundreds that cross, returning home,
are more curious to me than you suppose,
are more curious to me than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore
to shore years hence are more to me,
and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
One difference
that I’m noticing is the place in which the repetitions tend to appear in the
sentences. In the prose excerpt, Whitman repeats “what is?” to begin a series
of internal mini-sentences: “What is marvelous? what is unlikely? what is
impossible or baseless or vague?” In the poetry excerpt, his repetitions appear
at the ends of sentences. “I see you face to face!” is followed by “I see you
also face to face.” “How curious you are to me!” is followed by “are more
curious to me than you suppose,” which is followed by “more in meditations,
than you might suppose.” Notably, those sentence endings are not exact matches
but variations on a phrase. The initial phrase is always the most concise, whereas
the repetitions add or replace words and substitute new punctuation marks.
There are other
differences as well. The sentences in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” are shorter and
airier than most of the sentences in the prose extract. I never think of
Whitman as a poet who writes in compact sentences, but his prose seems to be
much denser than his poetry. Yet the opening question of that prose extract is
so evocative! What would have happened if he had used that
sentence to open a poem?
1 comment:
The prose has question marks; the poetry exclamation points.
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