There is no such thing as metered prose. That's verse printed without its lineation. There is such a thing as unmetrical poetry, though it must be powerfully rhythmic to make grade.
My priest used to say "This is the lamb of God. Happy are those who are invited to His supper." Under my correction he says "HAPpy are THOSE who are CALLED to his SUPper."
I adore Thomas Hardy, the rabbit hunting scene at the onset of Fowles' Daniel Martin, an abject obeiscance to Hardy. I went nuts over Cormac MacCarthy's beginning to his great trilogy. Listen to the rhythm of the railroad in that first page and a half. I've been after Mason to read it for years, and he finally did. Blown away.
The Dickens may even be over done. But Mark (and Oliver) the Lyly is divine: Although hitherto, Euphues, I have shrined thee in my heart for a trusty friend, I will shun thee hereafter as a trothless foe. Shrined trusty friend shunned trothless foe. Get over Carver, Oliver, and come home.
I'm a horseshit prose writer. But I find a good egg now and then.
"Upwind the pine-clad hills were on fire, and a pall of smoke mixed with the gritty dust of Yellowstone Valley fields. Dryland corn on deep alluvial soil was stunted and dead white. Even the irrigated sections were wilting in 5 percent humidity. Russian thistles, forced to ripen months early, were tumbling over fallowed fields like wind-driven drills, sowing their hated seeds." from Ploughshare
forced fallowed fields driven drills sowing seeds.
Certainly rhyme and alliteration and rhythm are ornaments as appropriate to prose as to poetry. In retrospect, I wish I had been more sparing of modifiers here, but it came after a great deal of the sparest, drought-stricken prose imaginable. And eventually, I changed it into metrical speech:
Farmers taught me to see our tumbleweeds
as wind-driven grain drills
sowing their hated seeds
in every furrow that the tractor tills.
This all came from Kelly Miller calling the tumbleweeds "wind-driven grain drills." I think that if we listen carefully and imitate accurately the speech around us, our writing can become rhythmic and memorable.
Whether either of these examples of Murphy, the only writer on whom I am expert, is memorable or not, they delineate between prose and verse, and attempt to answer the question.
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