Lyric prose is supple, nuanced, accurate, exact; it is grounded, it illuminates.
This is lyric prose:
From the Fosseway westward to Isca Dumnoniorum the road was simply a British trackway, broadened and roughly metalled, strengthened by corduroys of logs in the softest places, but otherwise unchanged from its old estate, as it wound among the hills, thrusting farther and farther into the wilderness.
This is lyric prose:
With the coming of dusk the rain had stopped, but a mist had risen, creeping knee-high through the trees so that they stood like ghosts, and the grazing horse floated like a swan. It was a grey, and more than ever ghostly because it grazed so quietly; he had torn up a scarf and wound fragments of cloth around the bit so that no jingle should betray him. The bit was gilded, and the torn strips were of silk, for he was a king's son. If they caught him they would have killed him. He was just eighteen.
Lyric prose is a horse.
This:
Ellie gawked like a child, unironic. She remembered something from schooldays: Janus, with his two faces, is the god of bridges, since bridges look both ways and are always double. There was the limpid memory of her schoolteacher, Miss Morrison, drawing Janus on a blackboard, her inexpert, freckled hand trailing the chalk line of two profiles. With her back to the class there was a kind of pathos to her form. She had thickset calves and a curvature of the spine and the class would have snickered in derision, had it not been for her storytelling, which made any image so much less than the words it referred to. Roman God: underlined. The Janus profiles not matching. A simple image on a blackboard snagged at her feelings and Ellie had loved it because it failed, because there was no mirror and no symmetry. And because the sight of Miss Morrison's firm calves always soothed and reassured her.
is a hippopotamus.
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1 - Sutcliff, Rosemary, The Eagle of the Ninth, 1954, the first paragraph. There is the startling and exact "corduroys". The last clause "thrusting farther and farther into the wilderness" lays out the first half of the main action of the novel. The repeated "farther" plants the motion of "far" strongly in the mind of the reader, giving a sense of depth to the landscape and the reality of the setting.
2 - Stewart, Mary, The Crystal Cave, 1970, from the Prologue. "Betray" introduces the notions not only of danger but also, literally, betrayal. This is leads directly into "would have killed him".
3 - Jones, Gail, Five Bells, 2011, from chapter 1.The paragraph is 9 sentences long and contains 3 framing devices for the central image of Miss Morrison at the blackboard. ("She gawked" "She remembered" "There was the limpid memory".) They alone account for a lot of this paragraph's herkey-jerkyness. The phrasing of "And because the sight of Miss Morrison's firm calves always soothed and reassured her" is imitation middle-period White; it draws attention to itself as an imitation because there is nothing else to counter-balance or be seen or weighed against it. The answer to the question (of why Miss Morrison's calves reassured) is simultaneously raised and suppressed; nothing is either resolved or deliberately left hanging. Every sentence whipsaws between the abstract and the concrete, with no link to what comes next except the bluntly explicit.
"There was the limpid memory of her schoolteacher..." We had been lead to believe that we were in Ellie's mind, and yet "limpid" in that position reminds us that we are not; Ellie's limpidity is more limpid than ours - the memory is over there, not here. "... made any image so much less than the words it referred to" is a stunningly awkward construction.
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This wouldn't irritate me nearly so much if Five Bells weren't being universally touted for its lyric prose, when its prose isn't lyric.
