[Janice D. Soderling]

Having often heard silly questions and silly advice presented with the gravitas of a village guru, I would like to offer a gentle reminder that writing is more than the sum of its parts.

A "go-to form" useful as a security blanket was a new illumination, but how often have we not heard such trite certainties as: "you have already said sad, so cut unhappy and tears'," or 'don't tell us that the sky is blue, we know that', or 'I hate colons and semicolons', or 'don't tell what it isn't; tell what it is," ad infinitum, all culled haphazardly from some two-bit list on How-To-Write or some fuzzy inner certainty.

A poem is more than a rhyme scheme. Beautiful prose can often demonstrate the essence of prosody better than many plodding poems.

To return a moment to William H. Gass, from the essay "The Music of Prose." (And note the difference between "for ever" and "forever".)

The Latinate measures of the great organist Henry James find an additional function for the music of prose. Here all it takes is a parade of the past tense ("he had") down a street paved with negations.

He had not been a man of numerous passions, and even in all these years no sense had grown stronger with him than the sense of being bereft. He had needed no priest and no altar to make him for ever widowed. He had done many things in the world—he had done almost all but one: he had never, never forgotten. He had tried to put into his existence whatever else might take up room in it, but had failed to make it more than a house of which the mistress was eternally absent.

If some men are has-beens, poor Stransom (in James's judgment) is a had-not-been. The passage is crammed with loss: "bereft," widowed," "failed," "absent,", in addition to the doubling of "sense," "no," "never," in succeeding sentences, and the gloomy repetition of the past tense, particularly "been" and "done." Our hero, we cannot help but hear, is a transom. He only looks on. But the music of the passage ties terms together more firmly than its syntax: "being" for instance, with "bereft," "done" with "one," "never" with "ever" and "what-" with "ever" as well. Each sentence, all clauses, commence with poor Stransom's pronoun, or imply its presence: "he had, he had, he had" trochee along like a mourning gong.

I would be happy to see other examples of prose that is musical or deliberately cacophonic or otherwise demonstrative of excellent writing.