Line or sentence? [closed]

You can speak perfectly meaningfully of both lines and sentences in poetry, depending on your objective. One might access the literal sense or import of a poem through the grammar of its sentences, while noting (say) the colour and emphasis contributed by the detailed verse structure.

One conventional feature of poetry is that it is divided into distinct lines. (This is not absolutely necessary: there are also prose poems) These will not typically correspond one-to-one to individual sentences. Most poetry in English (although forms like the limerick can work to constrain this) can easily have a sentence run across two or more lines, and a sentence may start or finish within a line. For different purposes, you probably need to talk about both.

Much the same applies to drama, but with different emphasis and an additional point: these days most drama is prose, but much drama (or other recited work) has been composed in verse (i.e. poetry), so the above thinking applies in the same way. To avoid confusion, it is also important to remember that in performed texts the term ‘line’ can also indicate a single utterance of any length.

A useful example for your main question is the first sentence of Paradise Lost (John Milton), which extends over the poem’s first 16 lines! Either or both of these ‘units’ can be discussed for one purpose or another (I have included line numbers):

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste

Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, [ 5 ]

Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top

Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,

In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth

Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill [ 10 ]

Delight thee more, and Siloa’s Brook that flow’d

Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence

Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,

That with no middle flight intends to soar

Above th’ Aonian Mount, while it pursues [ 15 ]

Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.

[Editions vary slightly in spelling, punctuation and other details. This one is ed. FT Prince, Oxford University Press, 1962, p28.]

All editions share these features, however... The first sentence begins fairly conventionally at line 1 with ‘Of Mans First Disobedience’. Its verb (critical if we are talking about sentences) doesn’t appear until line 6 with ‘Sing Heav’nly Muse’ (so we have to wait until then to find out why the poet is talking about ‘Mans First Disobedience’ etc. at all). After much punctuation, stitching together many clauses and ideas, the full stop finally arrives at the end of line 16.

That said, however, of course any individual line can be analysed and discussed in its own right, either in isolation or in its relationship to other lines.

Incidentally, it can be argued that the first ‘sentence’ effectively ends with the colon in line 10 where the poet stops simply commanding the Muse to sing, and (with ‘Or’) goes on to the new idea of another possible theme for the song. Arguably, the full stop is merely one convention for marking a sentence; witness poems with no punctuation whatever (e.g. almost anything by EE Cummings), but whose grammatical sense and sentence structure remains perfectly clear. It can be argued, therefore, that this colon signals the logical relationship of the second sentence (beginning ‘Or if Sion Hill / Delight thee more’) to the first, whose sense ended sufficiently with ‘Chaos’.

(Similar points can be demonstrated using other very formally-structured poetical texts—Beowulf, for example.)

On your question about drama... That will depend partly on whether you are discussing verse or prose, because in drama the term ‘line’ means at least two connected but different things.

First, verse drama is explicitly divided into distinct, individual lines, essential to any discussion of metre or rhyme, and structurally significant even when those are absent:

To be, or not to be – that is the question;

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep – [60]

No more – and by a sleep to say we end

The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to. ’Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep –

To sleep – perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub. [65]

[William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III Scene 1; cited edn is ed. TJB Spencer, Penguin, 1980, p124.]

Editions of Shakespeare vary considerably in spelling and punctuation. I have chosen this one partly because of the full stop to end the fifth sentence conveniently at line 65. The first ends halfway through line 63... in some editions with a question mark... and some editions place a comma after ‘rub’, so the fifth extends for several more lines.

Once again, the unit of analysis can validly be the line or the sentence, depending on what you are trying to achieve.

The idea of line numbers (in print) is potentially significant here. Offhand I have come across no systematic use for line numbers in discussing prose playwrights like (for example) Tom Stoppard or Arthur Miller, partly because print line breaks will move around in any case as an arbitrary feature of typesetting in any given edition.

In specific contexts, of course, line numbers might still be used with prose texts (including drama). I can imagine this being useful for reference, for example, with a text provided for an academic examination. Both students and examiners might find it very useful to refer economically and unmistakably to one of many uses of the word ‘antelope’, if it occurs dozens of times in the given text: perhaps we could say that the use at line 63 is an ironic counterpoint to the use at line 12, without having to quote laboriously.

On the other hand, it is solidly conventional for line numbers to be present in verse drama (for example William Shakespeare or Philip Marlowe). The line numbers in the above Hamlet quotation will be pretty much consistent across editions. (Editors suffer potential problems of inconsistency, however, as soon as one of Shakespeare’s comic characters suddenly embarks on a slab of prose.)

Second, in both verse and prose drama the term ‘line’ sometimes means, in effect ‘speech’, i.e. a certain character’s turn to speak, whether for a single grunt or several articulate pages. These days the term is commonly encountered in film and TV actors (who operate almost exclusively in prose) talking about ‘learning lines’, or ‘having lines cut’. An actor could say of the Hamlet quotation that this entire speech (which includes many sentences) is one of his longer lines.