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)