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POETRY AND PROSE. |
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words and epithets that would be out of place in prosaic description. Metaphors, similes, and indeed all the rhetorical figures of speech are freely used to variegate the conventionalities of everyday expressions, as the many-coloured blossoms of spring do the all-pervading sombre tints of winter. There are many words protected by poetic association from vulgar use, such as: woe, ire, blissful, a-weary, haply, list, ken, methinks, morn and eve, thou and ye for you. Striking epithets and picturesque compounds such as those that follow would disfigure good prose, while in verse they are pleasing and natural: sea-girt isle, vasty deep, the breezy blue, air-built castles, rosy-fingere dawn, the iron tongue of midnight. The poetic sentence is nervous, terse, and euphonious, and (very kind of inversion, elision, and departure from ordinary rule is tolerated in order to make it so. Though bound to be musical, and to excite pleasure, the poet is a chartered libertine in most other respects.
In spite of the freedom of treatment necessary in dramatic composition, Shakspere maintains a clear distinction between poetry and prose. His servants and jesters always speak prose, and others also in light conversation, but the language of emotion and passion is invariably metrical. Brutus commences his famous speech to the populace after the murder of Caesar in plain, direct prose ; but as soon as he begins to declaim and appeal to the feelings of his hearers, his words run into verse. The eloquent art of Antony's speech is metrical throughout |
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