Prose or Poetry?

For almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. --Melville, Moby-Dick

Update: JWebb says prosery and I agree. It can be read as either poetry or prose. Here's how it would look as poetry:

For almost one whole day and night,
I floated on a soft and dirge-like main.
Th'unharming sharks, they glided by
as if with padlocks on their mouths;
the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheath-ed beaks.

If you count it out, lines 1,3, and 4 are iambic tetrameter and lines 2 and 5 are iambic pentameter. Melville was a great Shakespeare afficionado and when he was feeling especially Shakespearean, he often wrote in blank verse.

Comments

[gail]

Extra credit for identifying the author and the work.

[JWebb]

Melville's "Moby Dick?"

[gail]

Absolutely one hundred percent correct Mr. Webb.

[gail]

Moby Dick is a novel, of course, which is mainly prose. But should this particular passage be classified as prose or poetry?

[JWebb]

I vote for "prosery."

[Ana]

poetry.

And that long-ass bit in the middle should be classified as a pain in the ass.

spam word:Ass.
wait. there is no spam word

[Jake]

What Ever Happened to Poetry
a poem by Jake H. 2005

Dang..

I thought it was from Spielberg's JAWS...

I think it's poetry,
because as far as I can tell,
post modern poetry is
pretty much any old prose

you want to break down and
arrange as poetry
and have the gall to claim as such...

What happened to rhyming words ?
What happened to quatrains and couplets; stanzas
and iambic pentameter
(the five heartbeats per line)?

[gail]

Jake, you old nihilist you. If everything is poetry then nothing is poetry. I agree on the "prosery" classification. I think that it can be read as either prose or poetry. But why is it (pain-in-the-ass) poetry Ana?

[gail]

IMHO, the line "as if with padlocks on their mouths" really blows.

[gail]

Oh, and he stuck that "they" into the third line to make it scan.

[gail]

Line 5 is a little heavy on the alliteration.

[gail]

Sounds sorta super sibilant

[Ana]

The bit in the middle of Mocha Dick is a pain in the ass. The bit about whale manufacturing etc. that I read because I had to if you can call skimming reading at all. That.

[Ana]

Poetry without rhyme is like tennis without a net.

I don't remember who said it. But he was smart.

[gail]

Oh yes, that stuff is interminable. But there is the part about the head butcher dressing up in the skin of a whale penis. When Melville refers to his part of the ship he calls it his "archbishoprick."

[gail]

See, we're back to smut again. Don't even have to work at it.

[Jake]

Lucas McCain: Whooooooeeeee !! I'd love to get me sum' them fine lookin' whale peen cowboy boots like all them Hollywood stars wear....maybe some matching holsters.

Micah: Me too Lucas.. but you cant get 'em round these parts.. You have to go online an order them from someplace like Ishmael Peenware.. Now they have some fine lookin' whale peen boots and accessories.. fine lookin'..

Lucas McCain: Ya..but they dont take American Express..

[Julie]

I can tell you about an antidote for poetry. Something that will kill all feeling for writing it, speaking about it, etc. Here goes:

Today I walked into my classroom to teach my poetry writing course, and my students had scowls on their faces. Why? Because some moron had urinated about a gallon in one of the corners of the room.
We moved our class to a lounge. But we had urine on the brain.

[Julie]

Ana, Mocha Dick is the name of my pimp. :)

[gail]

Julie, couldn't you all have come up with some nice Swiftian excretory verse? As in "A Lady's Dressing Room" where the protagonist, Strephon, finds the chamber pot while snooping around a lady's bedroom:

Thus finishing his grand survey,
Disgusted Strephon stole away
Repeating in his amorous fits,
Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!