Metered prose
And sometimes when I’m reading prose, I see a phrase that’s nicely metered, like a verse. I usually assume coincidence, but sometimes I am pretty sure it’s not.
(…If I were feeling cleverer, I would have writ this post entirely in verse. —Alas, I am not, and I did not; my attempts at meter here end with the preceding sentence.)
Anyway, I was recently reading a story by an author who also wrote poetry, and whose poetry at times paid careful attention to scansion. And I started noticing metrical phrases in the story, but in this case it wasn’t just one phrase, it was several, scattered here and there, in iambic pentameter or sometimes iambic hexameter. And the story featured rhythmically chanting monks, so presumably the author had rhythm on her mind. So I started wondering how intentional the meter was.
And then I got to this paragraph:
She had, one understood, her part to play; she wasn’t, for the moment, quite prepared; she played it later with superb effect.
Three phrases of iambic pentameter, separated by semicolons. I feel like that must have been intentional.
…but neither the paragraph that preceded that nor the one that followed it extended the rhythm. So I’m not sure what the author was getting at—whether the bits in meter had some particular significance, or whether she was just having fun including them, or what.
(The story was “A White Night,” by Charlotte Mew.)
