It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. Joyce's language moves on different principles. His prose is dense with heavy stresses, alliterative effects, and a careful placing of long and short vowels. The logic of grammar sets up a pattern of expectation, and the expressive delays, the departures from usual word order, and the surprising repetitions all form an articulating rhythm representing the liveliest of intellectual activity.
All expressive rhythms are variations upon a pattern of expectation.
The prosody of prose functions first as those departures from the normal grammatical structures of the language that set up lesser or greater impulses of meaning. When phonetic patterning increases, as in the example from Joyce, prose is shocked into verse. But the difference lies in the ability of poetry, through all the organizing devices of prosody, to achieve a higher expressiveness. The overlappings and concurrences of meter, quantity, and syntax can symbolize the movement of many simultaneous physical or psychological tensions. They exist in depth and are felt in many dimensions.