EXPLORING THE RIDDLE OF RHYTHM IN PROSE

My readers, being very literary, will enjoy hearing about the course I have been taking---
from The Great Courses, titled "Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft," taught by Dr. Brooks Landon, who has taught a "sentence- focused- prose- style" course for thirty years at the University of Iowa.

This course goes far beyond what we studied in English Comp. 101 or 201. Some of the lecture titles are:
"Proposition and Meaning"
"Grammar and Rhetoric"
"How Sentences Grow"
"The Rhythm of Cumulative Sentences"
"Coordinate, Subordinate, and Mixed Patterns"
and the one on which this post is based: "The Riddle of Prose Rhythm." Clearly, like old age, this course is not for "sissies."

This "rhythm" lecture particularly caught my attention and interest. Now, most of us have read quite a few books in our lifetimes, and these have been on numerous subjects. Here's a question for you: what writers and what books can you call to mind that you remember as being "rhythmical?"

Our esteemed Professor Landon says he cannot DANCE, but can detect or create rhythm in prose. He, in one illustration, hearkening back to his Boy Scout days, uses the Morse Code "dot-dot-dash-dash-dash-dash" in several variations to show the feeling of rhythm in a prose
paragraph.

This rhythm in prose is somewhat new to the writer ( though maybe not totally so) and I hate to disillusion my readers, but to me prose was prose and poetry was poetry (one I could understand, the other I couldn't! (LOL) Good, beautiful, writing I could understand, but Dr. Landon's concept of rhythm was somewhat new to me...and fascinating.

Turns out that this concept has been around for awhile. In the famous "Scholar's Edition" of Brittanica, 1875, 9th Edition, it said: "... The rhythm of nature is the rhythm of life itself. This rhythm can be caught by prose as well as poetry, high prose as well, for instance as that of the English Bible;" and continuing, "in the melody of the bird...the inscrutable harmony of a bird-chorus of a thicket, in the whisper of the leaves of the tree, and in the song or wail of wind and sea."

Ursula K Le Guinn reminds us in "Steering the Craft," "the sound of language is where it all begins and what it all comes back to. The basic elements of language are physical; the noise words make and the rhythm of their relationship. This is just as true for written prose as it is with poetry."

Virginia Woolf said: "Style is a simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't
use the wrong words."

Albert C. Clark's lecture, pub. by Qxford, 1913, "Prose Rhythm in English": Clark held, "We must go to Cicero for the origin of prose rhythm. Nature, he tells us, has placed in the ears a register which tells us if a rhythm is good or bad, just as by the same means we are enabled to distinguish notes in music....THE RHYTHM OF PROSE IS BASED ON THE SAME PRINCIPLE AS THAT OF VERSE."

Aristotle even weighed in on the subject of prose, laying down a "golden mean" law that prescribed "Prose should not be metrical nor should it be WITHOUT RHYTHM."

In E.A. Sonnenscheim's 1925 study titled "What is Rhythm," he defines it: "Rhythm is that property of a sequence of events in time which produces on the mind of an observer the impression of proportion between the durations of the several events or groups of events of which the sequence is composed." ("Okay, I think I've got it now." Mil) ("Whew."--Dr. Landon)

It would be impossible to convey to you all the ideas I'm learned in this lecture #13, but hopefully
it has sparked your interest and given you some ideas and perhaps a desire to follow this idea further. Let me know if you have some interesting examples of prose "rhythm," you would like to share.

What really inspired me to write this is a quote from Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway"---
"Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to it's gentle
pause, collected the green fields together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a summer's day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying 'that is all' more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, 'That is all.' 'Fear no more,' says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all it's sorrows, and renews, begins, collects,
let's fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking."

Did you find rhythms in that beautiful prose passage?
"Maybe."
"I think so"
"Who cares, it was beautiful!"
by Mil
Credit to: The Great Courses, and
Dr. Brooks Landon

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