Prose and Poetry

Arely Olalde

Vicky

English 9- Unit 7

16 November 2016

The Power of Prose

Have you ever read prose or a poem and understood the prose more? They both have ways to influence your emotions, but sometimes prose can be understood more clearly. Therefore, you can connect to prose more easily than a poem. Even though they have similarities, such as lyricism and literary devices, they also have their differences, such as the formality of the way prose is composed to the way poems can be arranged. These differences play a big part of the reason as to why prose is easier to understand than poetry.They can be as simple as a few words to the form of a few line. These subtle changes can confuse someone or help them better understand.

Prose can have similar literary devices and lyricism to poems. These literary devices include metaphor, simile, symbolism, paradox, imagery, and so on. Lyricism is mostly known to be in poems because of the way they can be read. However, lyricism in prose can be just as beautiful to read. An example of this would be in Cormac McCarthy's, Child of God,

"They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the Swales of Broomstraw and across the hill in the morning Sun, the truck Rocking and pitching in the Ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and Tuning their instruments, the fat man with the guitar grinning and gesturing to others in the car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with wrinkled face."

This piece shows that prose can have beautiful lyricism just as well as poetry. Because of the similarities in these two forms of writing, it help us to understand the emotions they can convey.

The differences in prose and poetry may not be big but they do influence the way they are interpreted and viewed by different people. Since prose has more details and is constructed of grammatically correct sentences it can be read and understood more thoroughly than poems. Poems can be harder to understand than prose because they can be constructed in any way the poet sees fit. An example of a poem that is written in any style is Our Generation by Jordan Nichols,

Our generation will be known for nothing.

Never will anybody say,

We were the peak of mankind.

That is wrong, the truth is

Our generation was a failure.

Thinking that

We actually succeeded

Is a waste. And we know

Living only for money and power

Is the way to go.

Being loving, respectful, and kind

Is a dumb thing to do.

Forgetting about that time,

Will not be easy, but we will try.

Changing our world for the better

Is something we never did.

Giving up

Was how we handled our problems.

Working hard

Was a joke.

We knew that