Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry

(Flounce of French Guipure lace from the late
17th- and early 18th-centuries, at the State
Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia)

The conversation below takes place between a philosophy teacher and Monsieur Jourdain, the middle-class son of a cloth merchant in the comedy The Bourgeois Gentleman by Molière (1622-1673), French playwright and actor. The play follows Monsieur Jourdain as he is preparing, with the help of tutors, to climb up the social ladder to the aristocracy.

Monsieur Jourdain (MJ): I must confide in you. I’m in love with a lady of great quality, and I wish that you would help me write something to her in a little note that I will let fall at her feet.

Philosophy Teacher (PT): Very well.

MJ: That will be gallant, yes?

PT: Without doubt. Is it verse that you wish to write her?

MJ: No, no. No verse.

PT: Do you want only prose?

MJ: No, I don’t want either prose or verse.

PT: It must be one or the other.

MJ: Why?

PT: Because, sir, there is no other way to express oneself than with prose or verse.

MJ: There is nothing but prose or verse?

PT: No, sir, everything that is not prose is verse, and everything that is not verse is prose.

MJ: And when one speaks, what is that then?

PT: Prose.

MJ: What? when I say, “Nicole, bring me my slippers, and give me my nightcap,” that’s prose?

PT: Yes, sir.

MJ: Good heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.

BECAUSE YOU ASKED ABOUT THE LINE BETWEEN PROSE AND POETRY

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

~ Howard Nemerov (1920-1999), American poet

Email ThisBlogThis!Share to XShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest

The Makers

(Howard Nemerov, poet laureate, 1963-1964 and 1988-1990)

THE MAKERS

Who can remember back to the first poets,
The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus?
No one has remembered that far back
Or now considers, among the artifacts,
And bones and cantilevered inference
The past is made of, those first and greatest poets,
So lofty and disdainful of renown
They left us not a name to know them by.

They were the ones that in whatever tongue
Worded the world, that were the first to say
Star, water, stone, that said the visible
And made it bring invisibles to view
In wind and time and change, and in the mind
Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world
And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers
Of the city into the astonished sky.

They were the first great listeners, attuned
To interval, relationship, and scale,
The first to say above, beneath, beyond,
Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine,
Who having uttered vanished from the world
Leaving no memory but the marvelous
Magical elements, the breathing shapes
And stops of breath we build our Babels of.

~ Howard Nemerov (1920-1999), American poet

Email ThisBlogThis!Share to XShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest