What is the difference between a paragraph and a stanza? Or, put another way, what is the difference between prose and poetry? Prose (the word comes from the Latin phrase prosa oratio, straightforward speech) is the sentences our everyday mind produces, saying this about that, constructing thoughts in clauses, and linking one after the next, paragraph by paragraph, into a concatenation of meaning. Interestingly, we also call this kind of language discourse, a word again from the Latin meaning to run about here and there, a linguistic phenomenon we see daily indeed.
Poetry, on the other hand, has less to do with constructed rational thought than language attempting to evoke an immediate awareness. Where prose is elaborate and extensive, poetry, we might say, is pulsive; where prose wants connection, poetry wishes for immediacy; one is horizontal, the other hierarchical or within the objective world prose assumes. Prose makes a world of things in order to find meaning through the joining of one thing with another. Poetry wants a world where things stand beside one another, the mere presence of one thing affecting the presence of another. These two ways of knowing, however, are complementary, not competitive, and in excellent work of either prose or poetry, it should be possible to find one way informing the other.
Here is a line from William Wordsworth, a poet of undoubted reputation and insight. He speaks, of course, from nineteenth-century England, a time and place different in temperament and idiom than our own, but similar too, perhaps one could say even identical, when it is a matter of discerning universal value. His poem “It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free” opens with these arresting lines: It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, / The holy time is quiet as a Nun / Breathless with adoration; the broad sun / Is sinking down in its tranquility. If we approach these words with our everyday discursive mentality, as indeed we must always when we begin to read, we can quickly understand what the lines depict: a quiet evening at sunset. With our rational understanding of the structure of the language, we recognize a simple independent clause in the first line, another in the second line, no verb at all in the third, and a predicate in the fourth. All that our critical eye ascertains, and so it must, consciously or not, in order for us to take meaning from the words.
But if a prosaic depiction is all we understand, then we might well be missing a further meaning, richer and more poetical, which that same analytical understanding of the grammar can help us see. Always there are the adjectives to consider: we know what it means for an evening to be calm, but what are we to think of a free evening in the opening line? Beauteous there in the first line is an adjective almost restricted now to poetic diction, but a holy time we recognize more easily, as we do a quiet nun. In that same second line, though, there is also the conjunction as, and if we pause a moment to think about what logical effect that simple conjunction has on the meaning of the line, we will discover that this little word creates an ambiguity which, if we do not miss it, will make the poetry a richer experience for us than what it merely meant on a first reading.
Our grammar will tell us that the word as is a subordinating conjunction. As a part of speech, conjunctions are the logical switches in a sentence, telling the reader how to relate one idea to another logically. Very many conjunctions have more than one such logical function, and among the many uses of the conjunction as are the distinct ideas of comparison and manner. At first sight, we probably understand the second line of Wordworth’s poem to mean the holy time is as quiet as a nun; we could assume, justifiably, that the first as has been omitted by ellipsis (as we might say, he’s rich as a king), and so we likely understand the assertion to be a simple comparison between the quietness of the evening and the quite solitude of a nun. But the conjunction as may also render the meaning of manner, or illustration (as when we say, he comforted me as a brother), in which case we could interpret Wordsworth’s second line to mean the time is quiet, as a nun is quiet. Here, the noun nun represents not another entity to be compared to the quiet evening as sharing the quality of quietness, but something—someone—who possesses in and of herself the very essence of the tranquility, giving us the chance to see the same quality fully itself in two very different worlds, nature and divine devotion. Indeed, Wordsworth goes on in the very next line to extend the illustration by pointing to the effect such devotion has on the nun, who is breathless with adoration, a wonderfully beautiful phrase to evoke—not assert—the same passion one might have for the quiet, resting evening in the first world.
We begin reading a poem by understanding its elemental grammar, and we do that with our everyday rational mind with its prose habits of thinking. But a poem is there before us to brighten our awareness of something in our common world as the poet sees it, not to explain it prosaically to our rational frame of mind, but to present it anew for us to know more profoundly. The poetic insight must rest on rational form, but unless we sometimes loosen the words from their obvious first interpretation, we might not arrive at the deeper vision the poet wishes to show.
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