[The Miner's Pale Children: A Book of Prose and The Carrier of Ladders: A Book of Poems] invoke by their subtitles the false distinction between prose and poetry: the real distinction is between prose and verse, since both are books of poems, with distinct resemblances and a few differences…. The prose pieces come with their dramatic title, The Miner's Pale Children, to preclude our criticism: if we ask why they are not more robust, they answer by a single eloquent finger pointing to sunless caverns where they were born: peaked and huge-eyed, like wizened English workhouse children, they stand in speechless reproach in the schoolyard, rebuking by their mere subterranean etiolation the boisterous ruddiness of the terrestrial.

The trouble with the analogy is that nobody tells us why the father of these pieces hasn't let them play in the sunshine more. There is maybe even a complacency in...