Music and Rhythm

E.M. Forster calls it "Prophecy." In more basic terms than Forster uses, saying that someone has "Prophecy" is the literary equivalent of  saying "I don't know what it is, but he's got it."There's more to it than that. Forster starts off by explaining what Prophecy is not. It isn't writing that makes religious claims, or calls for people to repent. Forster says that there's a song that drives the lines of a narrative that has "Prophecy." He uses George Eliot and Dostoevsky as examples. First, consider this passage from Eliot:...and Dinah waited, for her heart was so full that tears must come before words. At last Hetty burst out with a sob,"Dinah, do you think God will take away that crying and the place in the wood, now I've told everything?""Let us pray, poor sinner: let us fall on our knees again, and pray to the God of all mercy."Eliot does not have Prophecy, Forster says. I agree. The line "now I've told everything" has a staccato feel that may match the way the way Hetty speaks but does not flow nicely. The music of this line is read as six syllables of equal weight, which gives it an awkward cadence. Now consider if Eliot had instead written "now that I've told everything." The beat in that structure is up-down-down-up-down-down-up. It begins and ends with emphasis. That music is part of what Forster calls Prophecy, and Dostoekvsky has it:Not far off was a village; he could see the black huts, and half the huts were burned down, there were only the charred beams sticking up. And as they drove in, there were peasant women drawn up along the road, a lot of women, a whole row, all thin and wan, with their faces a sort of brownish colour, especially one at the edge, a tall bony woman, who looked forty, but might have been only twenty, with a long, thin face. Dostoevsky manages the pace of this passage so well that it drives forward. There is a sense of depth and urgency to every word, in part because he never breaks the spell with an awkward pattern of syllables (credit to the translator as well). His use of commas is more to manage the reader's pacing than to fulfill any grammatical requirements. But I don't imagine Dostoevsky counted syllables. I would guess he had a sense of music, and wrote from a place of passion, and that came out in his writing.Prophecy is neither a good nor a bad element in a writer. I like Eliot. Middlemarch is brilliant. Its allure is found in the story, ideas, and characters rather than the line by line pacing. Prophecy is a stylistic choice, and the objective for today is to experiment with it.The challenge is to write a passage that Forster would say has Prophecy.***She had said it wasn't working, and started to cry, and he listened, and burned. The unusual sensation spread from his spine to his fingertips and the phone shook in his hands. He could not speak. When she spoke again she said how sorry she was, how she thought he had done more for her than she had ever done for him, that the imbalance was part of it, that he would look back and realize this was the right thing to do. The night sky that had seemed full of stars a moment before now looked black and empty, and the trees loomed over him, and the wind chilled him to the bone, and he shook, and teared up. He hung up the phone. In his room he wrote all the dreams he'd ever had for them and all the good times he remembered, on one piece of paper. He took out a lighter. He flicked the release and watched the flame dance in the half-lit room and felt its heat in his fingertips. Then he put it away, and slid the paper into a drawer, away from his eyes.***Tomorrow: Plot and Narrative!Getting Started: 1Character: 1Point of View and Tone: 1Plot and Narrative: 0Dialogue and Voice: 0Descriptive Language and Setting: 0Revision: 0Overall: 0