Valery ... said that prose was walking, poetry dancing. Indeed, the original two terms, prosus and versus meant, respectively, "go...ing straight forth" and "returning," and that distinction does point up the tendency of poetry to incremental repetition, variation, and the treatment of different themes in a single form. Robert Frost said shrewdly that poetry was what got left behind in translation, which suggests a criterion of almost scientific refinement: when in doubt, translate; whatever is left over is poetry, whatever gets through is prose. And yet even to so cagy a definition the great exception is a resounding one: some of the greatest poetry we have is the Authorized Version of the Bible, which is not only a translation but also, as to its appearance in print, identifiable neither with verse nor with prose in English but rather with cadence compounded of both.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To-night, His frost will fasten on this mud and us, Shriveling many hands, puckering foreheads crisp.... The burying-party, picks and shovels in their shaking grasp, Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice, But nothing happens.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed a...nd would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
the eave-drops fall Heard only in the trances of the blast,... Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid, than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods... over every society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »