Is that poetry? Surely it is poetry. Can you improve it with the embellishments of rhyme and strict scansion? Well, sundry bold men have tried, and I will choose, for your judgment, the rendering of a part of the above passage by one who is by no means the worst of them--a hardy anonymous Scotsman. His version was published at Falkirk in 1869:
His hand on the rock the adventurer puts, And mountains entire overturns by the roots; New rivers in rocks are enchased by his might, And everything precious revealed to his sight; The floods from o'er-flowing he bindeth at will, And the thing that is hid bringeth forth by his skill.
But where real wisdom is found can he shew? Or the place understanding inhabiteth? No! Men know not the value, the price of this gem; 'Tis not found in the land of the living with them. It is not in me, saith the depth; and the sea With the voice of an echo, repeats, Not in me.
(I have a suspicion somehow that what the sea really answered, in its northern vernacular, was 'Me either.')
Whence then cometh wisdom? And where is the place Understanding hath chosen, since this is the case?...
Enough! This not only shows how that other rendering can be spoilt even to the point of burlesque by an attempt, on preconceived notions, to embellish it with metre and rhyme, but it also hints that parallel verse will actually resent and abhor such embellishment even by the most skilled hand. Yet, I repeat, our version of "Job" is poetry undeniable. What follows?
Why, it follows that in the course of studying it as literature we have found experimentally settled for us--and on the side of freedom--a dispute in which scores of eminent critics have taken sides: a dispute revived but yesterday (if we omit the blank and devastated days of this War) by the writers and apostles of _vers libres._ 'Can there be poetry without metre?' 'Is free verse a true poetic form?' Why, our "Book of Job" being poetry, unmistakable poetry, of course there can, to be sure it is. These apostles are butting at an open door. Nothing remains for them but to go and write _vers libres_ as fine as those of "Job" in our English translation. Or suppose even that they write as well as M. Paul Fort, they will yet be writing ancestrally, not as innovators but as renewers. Nothing is done in literature by arguing whether or not this or that be possible or permissible. The only way to prove it possible or permissible is to go and do it: and then you are lucky indeed if some ancient writers have not forestalled you.