20 Examples of Verses and Prose

Verses and prose

The verses and the prose They are two different ways of writing a text or expressing yourself in oral language. The verses are each one of the lines of a poetry which generally conform to rules related to meter, rhyme, rhythm, and sound. For instance:

What a restful life (verse 1)
the one from which the madding crowd flees, (verse 2)
and keep hiding (verse 3)
path where they have gone (verse 4)
the few wise that in the world have been! (verse 5)

(Fray Luis de León)

On the other hand, the prose do not conform to the rules of poetry (although they have other types of rules) and are the most natural and free form of expression of language. For instance:

No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sinking into the sacred mud, but the few days no one was unaware that the taciturn man came from the South and that his homeland was one of the infinite villages that are above…

(Jorge Luis Borges)

Characteristics of the verses

Characteristics of the prose

Examples of verses

1. Fragment of "Everything was love!" by Olivero Girondo

Everything was love... love!
There was nothing more than love.
Love was everywhere.
One could not speak of anything but love.

1. Fragment of "Insomne" by Octavio Paz

Mirror vigil:
the moon accompanies him.
Reflection after reflection
the spider weaves wefts.

1. Fragment of “Nostalgia” by Rosario Castellanos

Here I am sighing
like the one who loves and remembers and is far away.

1. Fragment of "Wealth" by Gabriela Mistral

I have faithful bliss
and the lost bliss:
the one like rose,
the other as a thorn.

1. Fragment of "Sonnet X" by Garcilaso de la Vega

Who told me, when in the past
hours as much good for you via me,
what would you have to be me sometime
with such severe pain represented?

1. Fragment of "I love you" by Mario Benedetti

Your eyes are my spell
against the bad day
I love you for your look
what looks and sows future

1. Fragment of "Poem XV" by Pablo Neruda

As all things are filled with my soul
You emerge from things, full of my soul.
Dream butterfly, you look like my soul,
and you look like the word melancholy.

1. Fragment of "You have me in your hands" by Jaime Sabines

You have me in your hands
and you read me the same as a book.
You know what I do not know
and you tell me the things that I don't tell myself.
I learn from you more than me.
You are like an all-time miracle
like a pain without a place.

1. Fragment of “El canto errante” by Rubén Darío

The singer goes all over the world
smiling or brooding.
The singer goes on earth
in white peace or in red war.

1. Fragment of “Ruidos” by Renato Leduc

In what language does the wind speak his word?
It is a great pity that there is no steppe
around the contour,
So I'd call a wanderer steed, etcetera, etcetera,
to this poor wind that cries at my door ...

Examples of prose

1. Fragment of Don Quijote of La Mancha (novel) by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“In a place in La Mancha, whose name I do not want to remember, not long ago lived a nobleman of the spear in the shipyard, old shield, skinny dew and running greyhound. A pot of something more cow than ram, spatter most nights, duels and losses on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and some additional palomino on Sundays, consumed three parts of their tax authorities".

1. Excerpt from "Dr. Jekyll and Edward Hyde, transformed" (essay) by Jorge Luis Borges.

“Hollywood, for the third time, has defamed Robert Louis Stevenson. This broadcast is entitled Man and the Beast: it was perpetrated by Victor Fleming, who repeats with ominous fidelity the aesthetic and moral errors of Mamoulian's version. "

1. Fragment of "The dream of the own car in the peninsula" (chronicle) by Sara Gallardo

"Barcelona. - Everyone wants theirs. Own car, non-transferable. Everyone wants it, at least in dreams. Reunited the organizations that study the survival on the planet and the hyperbolic urbanizations of the unimaginably large cities, the conclusion seems the same: public transport, zones for pedestrians. "

1. Fragment of a newspaper text

On April 5, a major investor arrived in the country and, according to sources close to the government, he intended to invest in the renewable energy sector. Yesterday the investor and the energy minister signed an agreement to start a wind energy project.

1. Fragment of Ion Plato's (philosophical text)

Socrates.-It is not difficult to explain, friend. It is visible that you are incapable of talking about Homer according to art and knowing for sure, since if you were to stick to art you would speak equally of all poets. Because there is, I suppose, an art of poetry altogether. Or not?"

1. Fragment of The archeology of knowledge by Michel Foucault

“For decades, the attention of historians has been preferably fixed on long periods, as if, below the incidents policies and their episodes, set out to bring to light the stable and difficult-to-alter equilibria, the irreversible processes, the constant regulations, trend phenomena that culminate and are reversed behind secular continuities, movements of accumulation and the slow saturations, the great immobile and mute plinths that the interweaving of traditional stories had covered in a thick layer of events. "

1. Fragment of "Continuity of the parks" (short story) by Julio Cortázar

“I had started reading the novel a few days before. He abandoned it for urgent business, he reopened it when he was returning by train to the farm; he slowly became interested in the plot, in the drawing of the characters. That afternoon, after writing a letter to his manager and discussing a matter of sharecropping, he returned to the book in the quiet of the study that looked out onto the park of Oak trees."

1. Fragment of the letter of November 19, 1880 from Vincent Van Gogh

“These days I made a drawing that cost me a lot of work. However, I am congratulated on having undertaken it. It is a pen drawing of a skeleton, a drawing of respectable dimensions, spread over five sheets ”.

1. Cooking recipe (instructional text)

To make the cake you must:
- Mix the eggs, flour, vanilla and sugar.
- Put the mixture in a round mold and place it in the oven for an hour.
- Let the bun cool and then unmold it.
- Cut the bun and fill it with jam.
- Put the top of the bun and decorate it with whipped cream.

1. Coca-Cola advertising text

"Look at the Coca-Cola side of life"

It can serve you: