The Prosodyne as Theological Form: Language, Metaphysics, and Revelation.

This paper undertakes an extended philosophical and theological analysis of S. C. Sayles’s collected Prosodyne works, uniting his poems, plays, and poetic-philosophical meditations under a single interpretive framework. It argues that Sayles’s Prosodyne form—neither poem nor prose but a dialectical fusion of both—constitutes a new mode of theological writing: a Logos-centred grammar of revelation in which art and doctrine coinhere. Through detailed readings of The Silence of Meaning, The Walking Man, The Ontological Reality of the Tooth Fairy, Just a Sacrifice, and Time and Times, the study shows that Sayles’s formal innovation is not stylistic experimentation but metaphysical necessity. Modern theology and literary modernism have often parted company—the former seeking precision, the latter seeking possibility. S. C. Sayles’s work reunites them. His Prosodyne form restores what centuries of rational abstraction had divided: intellect and devotion, argument and adoration. The Prosodyne does not merely comment on theology; it performs it. Each composition—whether staged as play, spoken as lyric, or written as philosophical meditation—is an experiment in how truth sounds when language remembers its origin in the Word. Sayles’s project belongs to the tradition of Logos-centred metaphysics traceable from John 1:1 through Augustine and Calvin to Van Til and Henry. Yet its vehicle is resolutely artistic. In his own definition, the Prosodyne is “a harmonic architecture where prose becomes the vessel of poetry’s pulse, and poetry becomes the logic of prose’s unfolding.” This paper reads that architecture as an ontology.