We explain what prose is, its characteristics, types and examples. Also, what are its differences with the verse.
What is prose?
Prose is the form of written language that differs from verse, that is, it has no meter, poetic repetition, or rhyme. However, prose has a rhythm own and in some cases it can approach the gender of the poetry.
Prose consists of a specific form of writing, which expresses ideas one after another in a consecutive, coherent and cohesive way. Shape prayers and paragraphs, instead of verses and stanzas of poetry.
Prose is the spontaneous and common order of organization of the language, both oral and written, and is used in most writings, books and treatises. There is even prose poetry, that is, poetry that is not written in verses, but in sentences. The essays They are usually written in prose, and the stories too.
In some cases, the term "prose" may be used in a derogatory way, as the equivalent of "verbiage." However, its origins go back to the Latin expression oratio prose ("Straight line speech") and adverb prorsus ("Directed forward").
Prose as a concept was already cultivated in the Ancient Greece, and in this culture it reached its maximum development between the 5th and 4th centuries BC. C.
Characteristics of prose
The prose is characterized by:
- Do not present rhymes, or reiterations, or meter as the verse does.
- The prose still presents its own cadence and musicality.
- Organize the ideas in a syntactic chain (sentence), which is followed by others until they form a block (paragraph) that shares meaning and coherence. Different number of paragraphs make up the entirety of a text in prose.
- It is the quintessential form of everyday language, of narrations, essays and scientific texts.
Types of prose
According to its expressive function, we can distinguish several types of prose, which are:
- The description. It consists of listing the features of an object, place or referent whatever, real or imaginary, until what can be said about it is exhausted.
- The narration. It consists of the orderly and successive enunciation of the events that make up a story, real or fictitious.
- The exhibition. It consists of toasting information the reader about a topic, stating one after another the ideas about it.
- The argumentation. Similar to the previous one, it consists of providing the reader with an interpretation of a specific topic, trying to convince him of a position, opinion or reasoning by means of the logical exposition of the own ideas.
Other forms of prose classification serve his intention, as follows:
- Poetic prose. Related to prose poetry (with which it should not be confused), poetic prose is nothing more than a prose highly charged with poetic senses and literary procedures, without ever being transformed into verse, although it has a cadence similar to that of the poems.
- The fictional prose. The one that narrates events and thoughts from characters they are not real, even if they are inspired by the reality. Such is the case of novels, for example.
- Nonfictional prose. On the contrary, one that narrates real, non-fictional events, even if it uses literary resources that beautify the text.
Prose examples
The following is a clear example of narrative prose, belonging to Don Quijote of La Mancha from Miguel de Cervantes:
″ I know who I am, ”Don Quixote answered,“ and I know that I can be not only those I have said, but all the twelve Peers of France, and even all the nine of Fame, because to all the feats that they all together and each one of them did, mine will have an advantage ”.
Another example, in this case of poetic prose, we get it in a text by the Chilean Gabriela Mistral:
“I had not seen before the true image of the Earth. Earth has the attitude of a woman with a child in her arms. I am getting to know the maternal sense of things. The Mountain who looks at me is also a mother, and in the afternoons the mist plays like a child on her shoulders and knees ”.
And finally, an example of nonfiction prose, comes from The origin of species from Charles Darwin:
“When a deviation of structure, and we see it in the father and the son, we cannot say that it cannot be due to the same cause that has worked in both; but when between individuals, apparently exposed to the same conditions, some very rare deviation occurs in the father, due to an extraordinary combination of circumstances - for example, once among several million individuals - and reappears in the son, the new doctrine of the odds it almost forces us to attribute the reappearance to the inheritance”.
Prose and verse
As we said before, prose and verse are opposite forms that define each other by opposition: what is verse will not be prose, and vice versa.
Where the prose is coherent and cohesive, moving in a single direction one sentence at a time, the verse on the other hand is usually interrupted at a specific moment to give the text sound, musicality and, formerly, meter and rhyme. The prose is continuous and orderly, while the verse is fragmentary and arbitrary.
This, as we said, does not mean that poetic prose or even prose poems do not exist.