Almost Prose

Lapis Philosophorum

I have posted this poem of mine here before, but there is a reason to post it again:

As we arose in bedroom clothes and toed along the beach
And casting out past dark and doubt, past stones in common reach
A net we threw of breath and dew returned us something rare
A thing long known, cold and alone; above―we thought―all care.

And homeward bound through hilltops crowned with silence and with snow
The way was steep, the way was cold, the way was far to go;
And riding down through sundark town, the captive moon our guide,
I laughed until I could not laugh, and, sick from laughing, cried.

We called our feat from street to street, as lamp to lamp caught fire;
‘Till some crank called out ‘Mountebank!’ and others echoed, ‘liar!’
And casting off the swaddling cloth, to show old friend new prize--
We found the stone we’d found was only water and God’s lies.

And all we knew we were, could be, or someday might become
Melted like that ice and left us naked in that sun;
And all we knew we were, had been, or someday still might be
Fell back and fell away, like foam, stone-broken, to the sea.

I repost because I recently submitted it to a poetry competition. And I received back this note:

“Dear Stephen,

Just checking... Is this an entry for the poetry section?

It is almost prose like”

Note that the piece features almost every known poetic device: regular metre, rhyme, internal rhyme, alliteration, repetition, imagery, metaphor, symbolism.

It is hard to conceive of a piece of writing being less prosaic.

So what is going on?

I suspect that my correspondent simply thinks that “prose” means “narrative.” And poetry is—something else. The typical “poem” currently is simply prose with arbitrary line breaks and bad punctuation. I’m inclined to say that it has to do with simply emoting in text, but that is not consistent. All that is consistent is the bad punctuation and the random line breaks.

Wikipedia: "Poetry (derived from the Greek poiesis, "making") is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language—such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre—to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning."

Merriam-Webster: poetry "1 a: metrical writing : VERSE" Capitals theirs.

We have fallen so far from poetry that nobody can even recognize it if they see it.

This is someone who cannot even be aware of most great poetry—of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, the Aeneid, the Ryme of the Ancient Mariner, the Canterbury Tales, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, Beowulf …. What have they read?

This is a sad time to be alive, for those of us who love the arts.