Why the green fuse?

I pushed the Dylan Thomas (see last post) at the blog a week ago - but to be published later (days after I'd chosen it)

And well before I'd properly thought about Emma.

I assumed since it was just a novel, I'd read it quite speedily. But no, I could not skim it. In fact, I could not keep up with the series on the Beeb.

Both the Thomas poem and the novel are challenging, and return slow reading, but they are truly not the same. The poem inverts sentences, uses elliptical constructions, the poet challenges the reader to work out what he means. Austen by comparison says what she means, but knows you are not likely to read it.

We all know that complex poems require slow careful readings, which we give them, and try to weigh the words and tease the sense out from them.

At the same time we race through novels, skimming the sense; we organise our understanding of them through plot and character.

Emma is decidedly not a poem; it is a true - and in a somewhat secondary and trivial way avant-guarde - novel. But it argues that the same reading habits that are appropriate for a dense poem are required here, in this prose.

Or demanded, for a true reading.

So, spending 20 minutes working out exactly what the start of Thomas's poem means is a mere fraction of what Austen demands in Emma.

Most readers don't notice, or give up, and fall back on the more comforting stories: Pride and...,, Sense and....

Truthfully; if you don't get Emma, you are reading too quickly.