To return, with relief, but thematically, to The Anatomy of Prose. Marjorie’s almost-final words on prose rhythm (though I haven’t forgotten Mouse) are these: ‘It is difficult to know how the good writer acquires the habit of good rhythm. Certainly he will be conscious of rhythm./ It is, however, probably that the rhythms of the Authorized Version, Donne’s Sermons, Sir Thomas Browne, D.H.Lawrence or any other great creators of individual and memorable prose were dictated by some kind of inner pressure, hardly felt at the time, just as the rhythms of poetry seem to come into the head almost unbidden.’ Why did Mouse die? ‘Possibly these things bear some relationship to the physical sensations associated with strong emotion – the rate of breaghing, the heartbeat, the frantic, eager or apathetic movements of the body.’ Mouse could be frantic, eager or apathetic, and for some reason his heart stopped beating. The prose of his days ended in a stranger’s garden, his skull resting on his forepaw, his tongue pink. Sometimes before, in his not-three-year life, he’d been a flashing poem. There were his patter songs, round corners on slippy floors. There was the haiku of his sleep beneath falling petals. Heroic couplets were his when he went into tabby kitten-battle against both ginger Iggy and tortoiseshell Ella. But most of the time his was a lithe, unemphatic prose. It could dominate and persuade, but once we were in thrall it slacked off into hundrum imperium. An indolent king on a Lay-z-boi throne. And for this reason, as recent witness to this, all of us expected long paragraphs to come of his minorly eventful life. The harumscarum months were over, the prince’s pride, and what we were faced with was sometimes interrupted by regularity: at this hour, you shall find me here. Without the walls that girt the garden/ bloody-toothed and still unsated/ his spear-head sang in fright and fall.
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