Sunday, 6 January 2013

More Hidden Verse?


Some of the text in Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest and in Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys Tetralogy is in fact verse even though laid out as prose. Some, though not all, of this concealed verse rhymes. There are also a few lines of rhyming verse in Anderson's War Of The Gods.

Therefore, some verse might be hidden in other prose works by Anderson. One clue is whether the rhythm of the text seems to be curiously regular. I thought that I was starting to find something like this in Mother Of Kings (New York, 2003) but am not sure. A passage of verse might not have the same number of syllables in each line and, if, in addition to this, there is no rhyme, then it is difficult to see where the lines might end.

As with the other works mentioned here, I have been trying to reproduce the apparent rhythm of some dialogue in Book Two, Chapter XVIII of Mother Of Kings by re-arranging the lines but, so far, have not done this convincingly. Yet some of the dialogue continues to look as if it can be re-arranged:

" 'She came with him.
" 'They sought to me.
" 'I made them welcome
" 'And have lodged them
" 'As was fitting.' " (p. 161)

I would be interested to know if any other readers can comment on this.

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