Eratosphere - Plodding poetry and musical prose

Eratosphere (https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/index.php)

- The Discerning Eye -- Opinions & Criticism (https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/forumdisplay.php?f=27)

- - Plodding poetry and musical prose (https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=21153)

Still, there is no reason to view a more lean and muscular prose as any less beautiful.

Take the last line of Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls, for instance:

"He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest."

And this gem (from the same book):

"But you have no house and no courtyard to your no-house, he thought. You have no family but a brother who goes to battle tomorrow and you own nothing but the wind and the sun and an empty belly. The wind is small, he thought, and there is no sun. You have four grenades in your pocket but they are only good to throw away. You have a carbine on your back but it is only good to give away bullets. You have a message to give away. And you're full of crap that you can give to the earth, he grinned in the dark. You can anoint it also with urine. Everything you have is to give. Thou art a phenomenon of philosophy and an unfortunate man, he told himself and grinned again."

Nemo

Hardly obscure, but prose hardly gets better than Lincoln:

Quote:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

I agree, Nemo. That is why I captioned this thread "musical", not "beautiful". Beautiful is, as we all know, in the eye of the beholder.

Hemingway is amazingly musical (lyrical, poetic) in much of his work. For Whom the Bell Tolls is an excellent example. I can't at the moment lay my hands on my copy (chaos in my bookshelves) but just consider the stunning passage when Robert (?) is having sex with Maria and asks (with Spanish tu we assume) "Did thee feel the earth move?" Though it has been ripped out and made into a cultural joke, the paragraph(s) where it appears is lovely writing.

I also concur heartily with Roger about the Gettysburg Address, though it isn't fiction (and I didn't make that clear) it is most certainly musical prose. And hey, Ma, no speechwriter!

The thing about Hemingway is that he could do more than one thing. He could do hardboiled (no poetry in The Killers) and he could wax lyrical.

There has been some really excellent input to this thread. Thanks to all.

Lear, Macbeth, Iago

Open Moby-Dick randomly and listen to Elizabethan music, especially Shakespeare's.

I'd like to mention Lewis Grassic Gibbon's 1930s trilogy, A Scots Quair, here. There is an extraordinary rhythmical, musical and poetical feel to the language in the first part, "Sunset Song", which is an elegy for pastoral life and man as natural beast, while in the last part, "Grey Granite", which is a critique of modern city life, the language is dead, wooden and hollow. A remarkable work. And not particularly difficult either.

Duncan

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters."

A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean.

Sonics and image and pacing combine to make this an exquisite short poem, for me. The only thing that makes it not a poem is the absence of line breaks.

p.s. Roger, I know that by heart. Even years ago, deep in Australia, I knew it. I used to teach it to my students as an example of beautiful writing. The music of the rhetoric makes it universal.

"But you believe in God," said Alyosha Sergei.

"I believe in this table," she said.

"A vulgar yellow thing that we have because we have nothing else."

"But convincing," she said. "It has such touching legs."

And because she knew, she smiled.

"Ludmilla," he said, leaning forward, "what a beautiful, luminous thing is faith.

He held his head to prevent it bouncing.

"Do you also believe in the saints?" asked Alyosha Sergei.

"I believe in a pail of milk," said Theodora, "with the blue shadow round the rim."

"And the cow's breath still in it?"

"And the cow's breath still in it."

(Patrick White, The Aunt's Story)

Oh my god! I wrote my honours year major essay on The Aunt's Story! It's actually my favourite Patrick White.

'And the cow's breath still in it'. Oh, yes...

"Oh," she said, "I was thinking of how I used to go down to the creek, and take off my clothes, and float in the water like a stick. It's good sometimes to be a stick."

(Patrick White, The Aunt's Story)