Prose or Poetry

Books and Men

by LORD DUNSANY

1

IT IS usually dangerous for anyone whose gift is one art to attempt to follow another. The pitfalls of following poetry when your gift is prose are obvious enough to be a byword, and a very common error is to follow the dramatic art for no better reason than that someone has written a successful novel, and has heard that managers pay better than publishers. Now, the difference between prose and the drama I can show you very easily. For instance, the novelist may write: “Far away to the left the sun was sinking under the hill, touching the treetops with pink and gold and orange, leaving long layers of crimson across the sky and turning stray clouds to purple” — and a great deal more; but the dramatist will write: “Sun sets left.” The electrician, or whoever is responsible for the lighting in a theater, will do all the rest.

Yeats told me once that a play had been sent to him with the stage direction: “A bee buzzes across the evening, leaving a track of silence in its wake.” The novelist had been at work there. But between prose and poetry I find it so difficult to define the line, that I have never known at what point prose strays over it. Therefore I cannot tell you where this line goes, nor can I define exactly what poetry is, or what prose is; I can only indicate a difference by saying that if a man who is writing prose strays into poetry it is rather as though at that moment he had become a little drunk; while if he is writing poetry and drops into prose it is as though the effects of a heavy meal of meat suddenly overtook him and he became dull and sleepy, without dreams.

I can only faintly indicate the difference by saying that in Ecclesiastes there is a melody in the words, and a frequent hurrying past of grand images, which from my earliest years has always suggested poetry to me, and does so still; whereas in the works of Pope there is a certain precision, a scientific and philosophical logic, which has always seemed to me to be of the nature of prose. So the essential thing about poetry is neither rhyme nor meter, and yet all thoughts of a certain elevation appear to demand appropriate words for their dwelling. It is as though such thoughts were spirits that would not walk among men unless suitably clothed.

It is more than clothing; poetical thought is the spirit, and the rhythmic or metrical words in which they are told are the body, and together they walk among men; and when one is separated from the other they are both of them gone.

Definition of prose or poetry I have said I cannot give, but one indication I may give of the difference, which is that poetry is concerned more with truths, and prose with facts. And then what is the difference between these? A truth is a spiritual thing, a pure essence; whereas facts are concerned with matter. Imagine the feet of a spirit thickly covered with clay: it would be visible and audible as it walked. It is a fact that the 9.10 train from somewhere arrived somewhere else at 9.30; it is a truth to say that speed is beautiful, or dangerous. Facts, in short, are things done; truth is the inner significance of them, where they have significance; and I suppose that everything has if only one can find it; and finding it is the poet’s job.

Once a man showed me the opening pages of a novel that he was writing, and he had something of a name. It began like this: “The mountains stretched away into the blue distance, rising up sheer from the sea, some of them over a thousand feet and one of them eleven hundred and twenty.” I suggested his cutting out the measurements, which he did, but then I saw that I could help him no further, for every paragraph had something like this, and I had no time to rewrite the book for him.

What was wrong was that altitude, color and distance, mountains and sea, are all significant, and are materials as useful to the poet as any colors a painter keeps in his tubes; but measurement is arbitrary and has no eternal significance. Measurement is only a matter of man’s prying into the secrets of nature, and feet are probably not much more than a thousand years old — even cubits were not eternal; so that to come so suddenly from a description of the height and color of mountains beside the sea to the measurement of them is to turn too swiftly from God’s work to man’s, to fall from heaven to earth, which is half the fall of Lucifer.

Of course the book in question was not poetry, but a novel, but I have already said that I am not able to tell you exactly where the line is drawn which divides prose from poetry. I believe that the rhythms of prose are able to hold poetry, or it may be that when they do, and when they do so continually, then it is prose no longer; but I never thought that this mattered, having always been able to admire a beautiful flower, even when I was not aware of its name.

2

THE difficulty in proving — what I believe to be true — that prose of a certain altitude is poetry may arise from having in the ordinary course of education come on some of the greatest poetry in the world always in translation, or having to translate it oneself. One thus had indubitable poetry in prose. Did it remain poetry? I think myself that prose is a vessel capable of containing the molten gold of poetry; but it has to be the best prose, or it will crack and the gold will escape.

The rhythms of prose are subtler than those of verse: you cannot name the rhythm at once as you can name an iambic. On what then do its rhythms depend? I think they depend upon the spoken word; I think they are suited to our breathing; and, just as no weapon or implement can be handily used if not properly balanced, so the weight of a sentence should be adjusted as carefully as that of a spear, without which adjustment a statement that may be important to the plot of a novel may have little more effect than the words with which I have heard more than one speech concluded: “Well, ladies and gentlemen, I think that that is about all that I have got to say, upon this occasion.”

Of course what I say about the rhythms of prose is for the feelings and not for the intellect; for were one to work out a rhythm with the precision of mathematics, one’s spontaneity would be gone, after which whatever one said might have the value of many millions after a mathematician had multiplied them by nought. The question is whether the rhythms of prose are august enough to hold poetry. I would refer you to the last chapter of Ecclesiastes, beginning: —

for English prose has probably risen to few greater heights, especially perhaps the first eight verses, ending: —

It is that that first made me believe that, the boundary between poetry and prose was only an arbitrary line. Being neither a doctor of divinity nor a doctor of medicine I will not go into the meaning of it, beyond saying that it is as full of images as a picture gallery, as poetry should be; and, indeed, long before much meaning was clear to me in it at all, those images shone for me very clearly, being carried into the sight of my imagination by the melody of the lines, though there is no meter there and no rhyme, except for those rhymes of which the Old Testament is particularly full, the rhyme of ideas, such as for instance, to take a verse almost at random out of the Song of Solomon: “Thine head upon thee is like Carmel, and the hair of thine head like purple.”

But though prose has no meter or rhyme, it has its rhythms, and may share with poetry a certain chiming that is sometimes made with vowels, of which Æ was particularly fond, as he told me himself. He told me that, for this reason, his favorite poem from the whole of the Oxford Book of English Verse was that one that begins: —

To hear Æ himself quote that poem was to understand the theory at once, and the loss of his voice is one that it will be hard to repair. But I wander from prose over that invisible line that so slightly divides it from poetry. What is there, then, in the rhythm by which you can test great prose lying so near to poetry that the Muses can hear it from across their frontier and understand its language? Well, there is a proverb that guides us here. And I have never known a proverb that was not wise. This one is: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” Prose, therefore, should be read aloud to test its quality, and with great prose it will always be found that the emphasis is balanced upon the rhythm as a rider upon his horse, easily and in the right place. Prose is shaped for the speaker, and its rhythms, and indeed the meters of all poetry, are probably fitted to our breathing.

Perhaps the ten syllables of our blank verse, the sonnet and much else of our poetry, make the length that is most suited to be said with each breath; and perhaps the great lungs of the land forces that fought round Ilion or of the navy which sailed, in ten years, from Ilion to Ithaca, or rather their descendants, found themselves able to say in a single breath the long line of the hexameter. But there is something more than this in the power that meter has to charm us, and I suggest as a subject for the research of somebody more scientific than I the discovery of why it is that if a man says,

exactly in those words, his thoughts will be carried down the ages, to ring on in the minds of men, and to hold mankind’s rapt attention, as though this meter were a magician’s wand. I think that the scientist making this research might perhaps find a certain harmony between it and our pulse beats.

It is known all over the world, perhaps too well, that a practiced speaker can make the dullest statement of some slight interest, whereas announcements of real importance can be lost on an audience if uttered in a rather different way; and the rhythms of prose have their part in this difference; indeed it is with the spoken word that they probably have their origins.

3

LOOKING over the borders of poetry, as one must so often do when speaking of rhythmic prose, one’s eye is caught by a thing that one sees more than one of the younger poets doing: they have one or two words every now and then which it is of great importance to utter; but there is not room for them; the line is filled up. What are they to do? Are they to leave these important words unsaid? No. They shove them in. It is perhaps only two extra syllables, and in they go. But; it can’t be done: it breaks the spell and the wand enchants no longer. They may argue that the words are vital to what they wanted to say, but magic is not concerned with that, and whatever magic there is in meter will not, when its spell is broken, carry their thought to posterity.

Some, desiring to escape from poetry’s rigorous laws and at the same time to have the honor of serving Erato, call their prose vers libre. I have seen much vers libre that was not sufficiently rhythmic to satisfy me as being up to the standard of good prose. Also I think that, in all the arts, thought is not infinitely deep, or infinitely high, merely because it is out of sight. How often does something like this get into print nowadays, to be accepted as poetry:—

How does this come about? Well, first of all the public have scorned all the arts and been caught, out by every generation, whether they were abusing Keats or Whistler, or hiding the Discobolus in a lumber room; and the public has said to itself in the evening, when business was over for the day, “I have evidently been a mug. I must pull myself together and not let it occur again.”

In this mood the young man with the burning desire for laurels finds him very much as the threecard-trick man finds what he probably calls his clients (a much misused word), for life is very like a race course. The young man is not after his money; his eyes are only set, as is very natural, on rewards rather than industry, and he shows him a modern picture, or sometimes a modern poem, and the public is just about to say, “What on earth?” when he remembers he mustn’t, for these are the very words that he used about Keats and Whistler; and he hastily says instead, speaking by the mouth of his critics, “Oh, yes, I think I see. Yes, I do.”

I do not know what the remedy is: to warn people to be on their guard against anything that they do not really understand is to make the life of the young poet hard again, as it has nearly always been; and it is also to give too much weight to the understanding, for no work of art is so much a thing to be understood as a thing to be felt, and no one that has ever said, “I am not clever enough to understand poetry,” or any of the arts, is on the right track. If none of the arts really do mean anything to him, then he should say, “I am not human enough,” not “I am not clever enough”; for the art s appeal to the emotions before the intellect.

The main trend of modern thought appears to be towards intricacy, and you see this appearing in all the arts; but intricacy appeals only to the intellect. The poet speaks, for instance, or used to speak, of love, while some of these moderns speak of the triangle drama. You see the difference. As I have said, it is harmful to the prospects of young artists in all the arts to put the public on their guard against modern work. I do not wish to prepare the Philistine against new artistic expression, but only to strengthen the palisades of sanity, which are being attacked from every direction; and whether you look out over them towards prose, towards sculpture, towards music or poetry, or even politics, everywhere you see sanity threatened.

Something has shaken the world — it may be that we are no more intended to live by and among machinery than are rabbits and foxes; let it suffice that this shock to the world, whatever it be, has slightly affected its sanity, and these effects are seen first in what is most delicate — that is to say, in the arts; and prose has been affected by it like all the rest. If I were to quote to you some modern prose as an example of sheer insanity there might be a libel action, and doctors that I should have to call in evidence would be taken away from more important work, to the detriment of many in Mullingar.

4

I HOPE to throw indirect light on what art is by referring now and then to what it is not. Of course, whenever I use the word art I mean all the arts; for they all have one thing in common, — that is to say, sincerity, multiplied and rarefied by an intense vehemence, — and the material of all of them is a vision, which by the brush, the pen, the chisel, or the actor must be brought to earth and made visible to its inhabitants. Perhaps the painter, the prose writer, and the sculptor may have one facility that is denied to the dramatist, and dead implements such as the chisel may be more easily handled than living actors, as Alice in Wonderland found a flamingo harder to play with than a croquet mallet.

But it is not only in the drama and in Carrollian croquet that a living creature comes between a man and his work: the prose writer, too, has to deal with him, for, leaving out of account the spider in the inkpot, he may meet with the printer and the printer’s reader, whose commas are very little things and yet may be as fatal to meaning as was that wound to Mercutio, of which he said: —

They are little things, but to ignore these fatal pests when speaking of prose is as though I were to speak of the splendors of Africa and never mention the malarial mosquito. Between the African traveler and the ends of all his journeys hovers a veil of these nearly invisible insects, often only irritating, sometimes thwarting his enterprise; so, between every writer and his readers come these little commas bred in the printer’s office, as the Anopheles breeds in marshes. Certain words are like treacle to them, and any writer who makes use of the word perhaps must expect them to come to it in swarms. Perhaps I exaggerate, but certainly two will come. The harm that they do can be explained very easily. The writer puts down “I am going to Dublin perhaps, with Murphy.” Or he writes “I am going to Dublin, perhaps with Murphy.” But in either case these pestilent commas swoop down, not from his pen, but from the darker parts of the cornices where they were bred in the printer’s office, and will alight on either side of the word perhaps, making it impossible for the reader to know the writer’s meaning, making it impossible to see whether the doubt implied by the word perhaps affected Dublin or Murphy.

I will quote an actual case that I saw in a newspaper. A naval officer was giving evidence before a court, and said, ”I decided on an alteration of course.” But since the words “of course” must always be surrounded by commas, the printer’s commas came down on them, as surely as the mosquito upon the white man’s ear, and the sentence read, “I decided upon an alteration, of course.” But besides the harm done to meaning by the hidden hand of the printer, commas used like this around certain words are wasteful; they are like signalmen’s levers being used to crack walnuts; they can’t control traffic at the same time. Luckily children are not allowed to do such things in signal boxes, but printers are allowed to use up commas round certain words; and, as only a certain number of commas is possible in a sentence, to do this is to take them away from their important work.

I saw not long ago a story of my own in a New Zealand paper, where the commas seem to have bred more abundantly than they do even in our climate. I read for instance the words, “breathing comma of course comma ceased comma too comma.” Although this flight of commas looks absurd, it does no actual harm; but, when they are allowed to buzz about the office in such numbers, they do harm sooner or later. For further on in the same story I had written: “for the surgeons had got his heart going again, and however the soul knew, it returned, and got back in time. ” But the word however is one of those sticky words which attract the printer’s commas, so down came two of them. It then read: “for t he surgeons had got. his heart going again, and, however”; but I need read no further, for it is now merely nonsense. I could give you innumerable more examples, but few of them are even funny, or, if they are, their humor is of no higher order than the old joke of breaking china. So long as printers are allowed to collaborate in this way, probably without even reading to the end of the sentence, these breakages of the meaning will continue.

Once when I had written upon this subject in some paper there came a hoot of triumph from a printer’s reader, or one of his friends, and he described how printers had ruined a line of Gray’s Elegy; he said that Gray had written a comma after the third word, tolls, but that a printer had improved the line by leaving the comma out. I don’t know how he knew, but the moment I read the letter, I saw the harm that the printer had done, and saw for the first time that Gray would never have opened his Elegy in the solemn hour when the curfew tolled for the dying day with so jingling a line as the one that has been handed down to us: —

This must have been, as that friend of printers stated, what Gray wrote: —

But nuances of meaning are all alike to the printer, and no more sacred to him than window panes to a naughty boy with a catapult. Once more I have strayed from prose over the borders of poetry, but prose and poetry are here allied against a common enemy. The language of Shakespeare and Milton is something to take care of, and it needs care now.