Norma C Plummer Stories
WHY POETRY IS NOT JUST FANCY PROSE
Granted prose reaches great heights in literature without the aid of
rhyme, meter or metaphor. On the other hand, poetry passes prose on the
highway, and veers off into the countryside, followed by a myriad of
words dangling from her rainbow skirts.
By jostling, entangling and colliding words together in this way, poetry
seeks to escape the limitation of their more factual meaning. The
outcome often is that words never formally introduced, become strange
wordfellows.
From these new word combinations spring language with thoughts sometimes
just beyond our grasp, an almost understood mystery. That is the hidden
magic of poetry. Naturally this sort of magic is not to be found in the
works of every poet, but the pleasure of discovery is worth the search.
This word-clashing is well illustrated by the Canadian poet Raymond
Knister with his "rain — bitten dust", or "misty blanket-seas".
Galway Knell, an American, catches this special magical feeling in his
poem "The Shroud", when he describes a milkweed seed floating freely on
the breeze:
" ....... chalking
in outline the rhythm
that waits in air all along,
like the bottom hem of nowhere."
William Butler Yeats is more likely than most poets to inspire the
fanciful.
In a hopeless love, that of the jester for the Queen in "The Cap and the
Bells", Yeats writes of the jester walking in the garden bidding his
soul rise upward to her window-sill. His soul is said to have grown
wise-tongued by thinking, and later, sweet-tongued by dreaming .
If occasionally we could leave behind the throb of urban living for the
more delicate one of poetry, how refreshed we might be made by this
place of respite, a place not quite defined.
By Norma C. Plummer (Hamilton, Canada)