From being emotive, poetry draws in more
of the man, and higher, finer powers, than prose. The poetical has,
must have, rotundity. No poet ever had a square head. Prose, in its
naked quality, is to poetry what a skeleton is to a moving,
flesh-and-spirit-endowed body. From the skeleton you can learn
osteology, but neither aesthetics nor human nature. Imaginative prose
partakes of the spiritual character of poetry. When a page is
changed from poetry into prose it is flattened, deadened; when from
prose into poetry it is uplifted, enlivened. You get a something else
and a something more. Reduced to plain prose, the famous passage from
the mouth of Viola in "Twelfth Night" would read somewhat thus: "My
father had a daughter who loved a man and would let no one know of her
love, but concealed it, until her cheek grew pale with grief,
patiently bearing within her bosom the misery of an untold
attachment." Now hear the poet:--
"She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought:
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.
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