A Study of Poetry Part 14

_1. A Rough Cla.s.sification_

Pa.s.sing over the question of the historical origins of those various species of poetry, such as the relation of early hymnic songs and hero-songs to the epic, and the relation of narrative material and method to the drama, let us try to arrange in some sort of order the kinds of poetry with which we are familiar. Suppose we follow Watts-Dunton's hint, and start, as if it were from a central point, with the Pure Lyric, the expression of the Ego in song. Sh.e.l.ley's "Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples," Coleridge's "Ode to Dejection," Wordsworth's "She dwelt among the untrodden ways," Tennyson's "Break--Break" will serve for ill.u.s.trations. These are subjective, personal poems. Their vision is "relative" to the poet's actual circ.u.mstances. Yet in a "dramatic lyric" like Byron's "Isles of Greece" or Tennyson's "Sir Galahad" it is clear that the poet's vision is not occupied primarily with himself, but with another person. In a dramatic monologue like Tennyson's "Simeon Stylites" or Browning's "The Bishop orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's Church" it is not Tennyson and Browning themselves who are talking, but imaginary persons viewed objectively, as far as Tennyson and Browning were capable of such objectivity. The next step would be the Drama, preoccupied with characters in action--the "world of men," in short, and not the personal subjective world of the highly sensitized lyric poet.

Let us now move away from that pure lyric centre in another direction. In a traditional ballad like "Sir Patrick Spens," a modern ballad like Tennyson's "The Revenge," or Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," is not the poet's vision becoming objectified, directed upon events or things outside of the circle of his own subjective emotion? In modern epic verse, like Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur," Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustum," Morris's "Sigurd the Volsung," and certainly in the "Aeneid" and the "Song of Roland," the poet sinks his own personality, as far as possible, in the objective narration of events. And in like manner, the poet may turn from the world of action to the world of repose, and portray Nature as enfolding and subduing the human element in his picture. In Keats's "Ode to Autumn," Sh.e.l.ley's "Autumn," in Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper,"

Browning's "Where the Mayne Glideth," we find poets absorbed in the external scene or object and striving to paint it. It is true that the born lyrists betray themselves constantly, that they suffuse both the world of repose and the world of action with the coloring of their own unquiet spirits. They cannot keep themselves wholly out of the story they are telling or the picture they are painting; and it is for this reason that we speak of "lyrical" pa.s.sages even in the great objective dramas, pa.s.sages colored with the pa.s.sionate personal feelings of the poet. For he cannot be wholly "absolute" even if he tries: he will invent favorite characters and make them the mouthpiece of his own fancies: he will devise favorite situations, and use them to reveal his moral judgment of men and women, and his general theory of human life.

_2. Definitions_

While we must recognize, then, that the meaning of the word "lyrical" has been broadened so as to imply, frequently, a quality of poetry rather than a mere form of poetry, let us go back for a moment to the original significance of the word. Derived from "lyre," it meant first a song written for musical accompaniment, say an ode of Pindar; then a poem whose form suggests this original musical accompaniment; then, more loosely, a poem which has the quality of music, and finally, purely personal poetry.

[Footnote: See the definitions in John Erskine's _Elizabethan Lyric_, E.

B. Heed's _English Lyrical Poetry_, Ernest Rhys's _Lyric Poetry_, F. E.

Sch.e.l.ling's _The English Lyric_, John Drinkwater's _The Lyric_, C. E.

Whitmore in _Pub. Mod. Lang. a.s.s._, December, 1918.]

"All songs, all poems following cla.s.sical lyric forms; all short poems expressing the writer's moods and feelings in rhythm that suggests music, are to be considered lyrics," says Professor Reed. "The lyric is concerned with the poet, his thoughts, his emotions, his moods, and his pa.s.sions....

With the lyric subjective poetry begins," says Professor Sch.e.l.ling. "The characteristic of the lyric is that it is the product of the pure poetic energy una.s.sociated with other energies," says Mr. Drinkwater. These are typical recent definitions. Francis T. Palgrave, in the Preface to the _Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics_, while omitting to stress the elements of musical quality and of personal emotion, gives a working rule for anthologists which has proved highly useful. He held the term "lyrical" "to imply that each poem shall turn on a single thought, feeling or situation." The critic Scherer also gave an admirable practical definition when he remarked that the lyric "reflects a situation or a desire." Keats's sonnet "On first looking into Chapman's Homer," Charles Kingsley's "Airlie Beacon" and Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!" (_Oxford Book of Verse_, Nos. 634, 739 and 743) are suggestive ill.u.s.trations of Scherer's dictum.

_3. General Characteristics_

But the lyric, however it may be defined, has certain general characteristics which are indubitable. The lyric "vision," that is to say, the experience, thought, emotion which gives its peculiar quality to lyric verse, making it "simple, sensuous, pa.s.sionate" beyond other species of poetry, is always marked by freshness, by egoism, and by genuineness.

To the lyric poet all must seem new; each sunrise "_herrlich wie am ersten Tag._" "Thou know'st 'tis common," says Hamlet's mother, speaking of his father's death, "Why seems it so particular with thee?" But to men of the lyrical temperament everything is "particular." Age does not alter their exquisite sense of the novelty of experience. Tennyson's lines on "Early Spring," written at seventy-four, Browning's "Never the Time and the Place" written at seventy-two, Goethe's love-lyrics written when he was eighty, have all the delicate bloom of adolescence. Sometimes this freshness seems due in part to the poet's early place in the development of his national literature: he has had, as it were, the first chance at his particular subject. There were countless springs, of course, before a nameless poet, about 1250, wrote one of the first English lyrics for which we have a contemporary musical score:

"Sumer is ic.u.men in, Lhude sing cuccu."

But the words thrill the reader, even now, as he hears in fancy that cuckoo's song,

"Breaking the silence of the seas Beyond the farthest Hebrides."

Or, the lyric poet may have the luck to write at a period when settled, stilted forms of poetical expression are suddenly done away with. Perhaps he may have helped in the emanc.i.p.ation, like Wordsworth and Coleridge in the English Romantic Revival, or Victor Hugo in the France of 1830. The new sense of the poetic possibilities of language reacts upon the imaginative vision itself. Free verse, in our own time, has profited by this rejuvenation of the poetic vocabulary, by new phrases and cadences to match new moods. Sometimes an unwonted philosophical insight makes all things new to the poet who possesses it. Thus Emerson's vision of the "Eternal Unity," or Browning's conception of Immortality, afford the very stuff out of which poetry may be wrought. Every new experience, in short, like falling in love, like having a child, like getting "converted,"

[Footnote: See William James, _The Varieties of Religious Experience_.]

gives the lyric poet this rapturous sense of living in a world hitherto unrealized. The old truisms of the race become suddenly "particular" to him. "As for man, his days are as gra.s.s. As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth." That was first a "lyric cry" out of the depths of some fresh individual experience. It has become stale through repet.i.tion, but many a man, listening to those words read at the burial of a friend, has seemed, in his pa.s.sionate sense of loss, to hear them for the first time.

Egoism is another mark of the lyric poet. "Of every poet of this cla.s.s,"

remarks Watts-Dunton, "it may be said that his mind to him 'a kingdom is,'

and that the smaller the poet the bigger to him is that kingdom." He celebrates himself. Contemporary lyrists have left no variety of physical sensation unnoted: they tell us precisely how they feel and look when they take their morning tub. Far from avoiding that "pathetic fallacy" which Ruskin a.n.a.lysed in a famous chapter, [Footnote: _Modern Painters_, vol. 3, chap. 12.]

and which attributes to the external world qualities which belong only to the mind itself, they revel in it. "Day, like our souls, is _fiercely dark_," sang Elliott, the Corn-Law Rhymer. Hamlet, it will be remembered, could be lyrical enough upon occasion, but he retained the power of distinguishing between things as they actually were and things as they appeared to him in his weakness and his melancholy. "This goodly frame, the earth, seems _to me_ a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing _to me_ than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man!

How n.o.ble in reason! how infinite in faculty!... And yet, _to me_, what is this quintessence of dust?"

Nevertheless this lyric egoism has certain moods in which the individual identifies himself with his family or tribe:

"O Keith of Ravelstone, The sorrows of thy line!"

School and college songs are often, in reality, tribal lyrics. The choruses of Greek tragedies dealing with the guilt and punishment of a family, the Hebrew lyrics chanting, like "The Song of Deborah," the fortunes of a great fight, often broaden their sympathies so as to include, as in "The Persians" of Aeschylus, the glory or the downfall of a race. And this sense of identification with a nation or race implies no loss, but often an amplification of the lyric impulse. Alfred Noyes's songs about the English, D'Annunzio's and Hugo's splendid chants of the Latin races, Kipling's glorification of the White Man, lose nothing of their lyric quality because of their nationalistic or racial inspiration.

Read Wilfrid Blunt's sonnet on "Gibraltar" (_Oxford Book of Verse_, No. 821):

"Ay, this is the famed rock which Hercules And Goth and Moor bequeath'd us. At this door England stands sentry. G.o.d! to hear the shrill Sweet treble of her fifes upon the breeze, And at the summons of the rock gun's roar To see her red coats marching from the hill!"

Are patriotic lyrics of this militant type destined to disappear, as Tolstoy believed they ought to disappear, with the breaking-down of the barriers of nationality, or rather with the coming of

"One common wave of thought and joy, Lifting mankind again"

over the barriers of nationality? Certainly there is already a type of purely humanitarian, altruistic lyric, where the poet instinctively thinks in terms of "us men" rather than of "I myself." It appeared long ago in that rebellious "t.i.tanic" verse which took the side of oppressed mortals as against the unjust G.o.ds. Tennyson's "Lotos-Eaters" is a modern echo of this defiant or despairing cry of the "ill-used race of men." The songs of Burns reveal ever-widening circles of sympathy,--pure personal egoism, then songs of the family and of clan and of country-side, then pa.s.sion for Scotland, and finally this fierce peasant affection for his own pa.s.ses into the glorious

"It's comin' yet for a' that, That man to man the world o'er Shall brithers be for a' that."

One other general characteristic of the lyric mood needs to be emphasized, namely, its _genuineness_. It is impossible to feign

"the lyric gush, And the wing-power, and the rush Of the air."

Second-rate, imitative singers may indeed a.s.sume the role of genuine lyric poets, but they cannot play it without detection. It is literally true that natural lyrists like Sappho, Burns, Goethe, Heine, "sing as the bird sings." Once endowed with the lyric temperament and the command of technique, their cry of love or longing, of grief or patriotism, is the inevitable resultant from a real situation or desire. Sometimes, like children, they do not tell us very clearly what they are crying about, but it is easy to discover whether they are, like children, "making believe."

_4. The Objects of the Lyric Vision_

Let us look more closely at some of the objects of the lyric vision; the sources or material, that is to say, for the lyric emotion. Goethe's often-quoted cla.s.sification is as convenient as any: the poet's vision, he says, may be directed upon Nature, Man or G.o.d.

And first, then, upon Nature. One characteristic of lyric poetry is the clearness with which single details or isolated objects in Nature may be visualized and reproduced. The modern reflective lyric, it is true, often depends for its power upon some philosophical generalization from a single instance, like Emerson's "Rhodora" or Wordsworth's "Small Celandine." It may even attempt a sort of logical or pseudo-logical deduction from given premises, like Browning's famous

"Morning's at seven; The hillside's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing: The snail's on the thorn; G.o.d's in his Heaven-- _All's right with the world!_"

The imagination cannot be denied this right to synthesize and to interpret, and nevertheless Nature offers even to the most unphilosophical her endless profusion of objects that awaken delight. She does not insist that the lyric poet should generalize unless he pleases. Moth and snail and skylark, daisy and field-mouse and water-fowl, seized by an eye that is quick to their poetic values, their interest to men, furnish material enough for lyric feeling. The fondness of Romantic poets for isolating a single object has been matched in our day by the success of the Imagists in painting a single aspect of some phenomenon--

"Light as the shadow of the fish That falls through the pale green water--"

any aspect, in short, provided it affords the "romantic quiver," the quick, keen sense of the beauty in things. What an art-critic said of the painter W. M. Chase applies equally well to many contemporary Imagists who use the forms of lyric verse: "He saw the world as a display of beautiful surfaces which challenged his skill. It was enough to set him painting to note the nacreous skin of a fish, or the satiny bloom of fruit, or the wind-smoothed dunes about Shinnec.o.c.k, or the fine specific olive of a woman's face.... He took objects quite at their face value, and rarely invested them with the tenderness, mystery and understanding that comes from meditation and remembered feelings.... We get in him a fine, bare vision, and must not expect therewith much contributary enrichment from mind and mood."

[Footnote: _The Nation_, November 2, 1916.]

Our point is that this "fine, bare vision" is often enough for a lyric. It has no time for epic breadth of detail, for the rich acc.u.mulation of harmonious images which marks Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustum" or Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes."

The English Romantic poets were troubled about the incursion of scientific fact into the poet's view of nature. The awful rainbow in heaven might be turned, they thought, through the curse of scientific knowledge, into the "dull catalogue of common things." But Wordsworth was wiser than this. He saw that if the scientific fact were emotionalized, it could still serve as the stuff of poetry. Facts could be transformed into truths. No aspect of Tennyson's lyricism is more interesting than his constant employment of the newest scientific knowledge of his day, for instance, in geology, chemistry and astronomy. He set his facts to music. Eugene Lee-Hamilton's poignant sonnet about immortality is an ill.u.s.tration of the ease with which a lyric poet may find material in scientific fact, if appropriated and made rich by feeling.

[Footnote: Quoted in chap. VIII, section 7.]

If lyric poetry shows everywhere this tendency to humanize its "bare vision" of Nature, it is also clear that the lyric, as the most highly personalized species of poetry, exhibits an infinite variety of visions of human life. Any anthology will ill.u.s.trate the range of observation, the complexity of situations and desires, the constant changes in key, as the lyric attempts to interpret this or that aspect of human emotion. Take for example, the Elizabethan love-lyric. Here is a single human pa.s.sion, expressing itself in the moods and lyric forms of one brief generation of our literature. Yet what variety of personal accent, what kaleidoscopic shiftings of mind and imagination, what range of lyric beauty! Or take the pa.s.sion for the wider interests of Humanity, expressed in the lyrics of Schiller and Burns, running deep and turbid through Revolutionary and Romantic verse, and still coloring--perhaps now more strongly than ever--the stream of twentieth-century poetry. Here is a type of lyric emotion where self-consciousness is lost, absorbed in the wider consciousness of kinship, in the dawning recognition of the oneness of the blood and fate of all nations of the earth.

The purest type of lyric vision is indicated in the third word of Goethe's triad. It is the vision of G.o.d. Here no physical fact intrudes or mars.

Here thought, if it be complete thought, is wholly emotionalized. Such transcendent vision, as in the Hebrew lyrists and in Dante, is itself worship, and the lyric cry of the most consummate artist among English poets of the last generation is simply an echo of the ancient voices:

"Hallowed be Thy Name--Hallelujah!"

If Tennyson could not phrase anew the ineffable, it is no wonder that most hymn-writers fail. They are trying to express in conventionalized religious terminology and in "long and short metre" what can with difficulty be expressed at all, and if at all, by the unconscious art of the Psalms or by a sustained metaphor, like "Crossing the Bar" or the "Recessional." The medieval Latin hymns clothed their transcendent themes, their pa.s.sionate emotions, in the language of imperial Rome. The modern sectaries succeed best in their hymnology when they choose simple ideas, not too definite in content, and clothe them, as Whittier did, in words of tender human a.s.sociation, in parables of longing and of consolation.

_5. The Lyric Imagination_

The material thus furnished by the lyric poet's experience, thought and emotion is reshaped by an imagination working simply and spontaneously.

The lyrist is born and not made, and he cannot help transforming the actual world into his own world, like Don Quixote with the windmills and the serving-women. Sometimes his imagination fastens upon a single trait or aspect of reality, and the resultant metaphor seems truer than any logic.