_ PART II. THE LYRIC IN PARTICULAR
CHAPTER VII. THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY
"O hearken, love, the
battle-horn!
The triumph clear, the silver scorn!
O hearken where the echoes bring.
Down the grey disastrous morn,
Laughter and rallying!"
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY
CHAPTER VII. THE FIELD OF LYRIC POETRY
"'Lyrical,' it may be
said, implies a form of musical utterance
in words governed by overmastering emotion and set free by a
powerfully concordant
rhythm."
ERNEST RHYS, Lyric Poetry
That "confusion of the genres" which characterizes so much of
contemporary art has not obliterated the ancient division of poetry into three chief types, namely, lyric, epic and dramatic. We
still mean by these words very much what the Greeks meant: a "lyric" is something sung, an "epic" tells a story, a "drama" sets
characters in action. Corresponding to these general purposes of the three kinds of poetry, is the difference which Watts-Dunton
has discussed so suggestively: namely, that in the lyric the author reveals himself fully, while in the "epic" or narrative poem
the author himself is but partly revealed, and in the drama the author is hidden behind his characters. Or, putting this
difference in another way, the same critic points out that the true dramatists possess "absolute" vision, i.e. unconditioned by
the personal impulses of the poet himself, whereas the vision of the lyrist is "relative," conditioned by his own situation and
mood. The pure lyrist, says Watts-Dunton, has one voice and sings one tune; the epic poets and quasi-dramatists have one voice
but can sing several tunes, while the true dramatists, with their objective, "absolute" vision of the world, have many tongues
and can sing in all tunes.
1. A Rough Classification Passing 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. Shelley'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 illustrations. These are subjective, personal poems. Their vision
is "relative" to the poet's actual circumstances. 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," Shelley'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" passages even
in the great objective dramas, passages colored with the passionate 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. Schelling's
The English Lyric, John Drinkwater's
The Lyric, C.
E. Whitmore in
Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass., December, 1918.] "All songs, all poems following classical 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 passions.... With the lyric
subjective poetry begins," says Professor Schelling. "The characteristic of the lyric is that it is the product of the pure
poetic energy unassociated 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 illustrations 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, passionate" 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
icumen 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 emancipation,
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 grass. 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 repetition, but many a man, listening to
those words read at the burial of a friend, has seemed, in his passionate sense of loss, to hear them for the first time.
Egoism is another mark of the lyric poet. "Of every poet of this class," 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 analysed 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 noble
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. God! 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 "Titanic" verse which took the side of
oppressed mortals as against the unjust gods. 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 passion for Scotland, and finally this fierce peasant affection for his own passes
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 assume 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 classification is as
convenient as any: the poet's vision, he says, may be directed upon Nature, Man or God.
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;
God'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 Shinnecock, 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 accumulation 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 illustration 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 illustrate 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 passion, 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 passion 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 God. 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 passionate
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 association, 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.
"Death lays his icy hand on Kings."
"I wandered lonely as a cloud."
Sometimes his
imagination fuses various aspects of an object into a composite effect:
"A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May,
Although
it fall and die that night;
It was the
plant and flower of light."
The lyric emotion, it is true, does not always
catch at imagery. It may deal directly with the fact, as in Burns's immortal
"If we ne'er had met sae kindly,
If we ne'er
had loved sae blindly,
Never loved, and never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted."
The lyric atmosphere, heavy and
clouded with passionate feeling, idealizes objects as if they were seen through the light of dawn or sunset. It is never the dry
clear light of noon.
"She was
a phantom of delight."
"Thy soul was
like a star, and dwelt apart,
Thou
hadst a voice whose sound was
like the sea,
Pure as
the naked heavens...."
This idealization is often not so
much a magnification of the object as a simplification of it. Confusing details are stripped away. Contradictory facts are
eliminated, until heart answers to heart across the welter of immaterialities.
Although the psychologists, as has been already
noted, are now little inclined to distinguish between the imagination and the fancy, it remains true that the old distinction
between superficial or "fanciful" resemblances, and deeper or "imaginative" likenesses, is a convenient one in lyric poetry. E.
C. Stedman, in his old age, was wont to say that our younger lyrists, while tuneful and fanciful enough, had no imagination or
passion, and that what was needed in America was some adult male verse. The verbal felicity and richness of fancy that
characterized the Elizabethan lyric were matched by its sudden gleams of penetrative imagination, which may be, after all, only
the "fancy" taking a deeper plunge. In the familiar song from
The Tempest, for example, we have in the second and third
lines examples of those fanciful conceits in which the age delighted, but that does not impair the purely imaginative beauty of
the last three lines of the stanza,--the lines that are graven upon Shelley's tombstone in Rome:
"Full fathom five thy
father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth
suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange."
So it was that Hawthorne's "fancy" first won a public for his stories,
while it is by his imagination that he holds his place as an artist. For the deeply imaginative line of lyric verse, like the
imaginative conception of novelist or dramatist, often puzzles or repels a poet's contemporaries. Jeffrey could find no sense in
Wordsworth's superb couplet in the "Ode to Duty":
"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens,
through Thee, are
fresh and strong."
And oddly enough, Emerson, the one man upon this side of the Atlantic from whom an
instinctive understanding of those lines was to be expected, was as much perplexed by them as Jeffrey.
6. Lyric
Expression Is it possible to formulate the laws of lyric expression? "I do not mean by expression," said Gray, "the mere
choice of words, but the whole dress, fashion, and arrangement of a thought." [Footnote: Gray's
Letters, vol. 2, p. 333.
(Gosse ed.)] Taking expression, in this larger sense, as the final element in that threefold process by which poetry comes into
being, and which has been discussed in an earlier chapter, we may assert that there are certain general laws of lyric form. One
of them is the law of brevity. It is impossible to keep the lyric pitch for very long. The rapture turns to pain. "I need
scarcely observe," writes Poe in his essay on "The Poetic Principle," "that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it
excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are,
through a psychical necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be
sustained throughout a composition of any great length. After the lapse of half an hour, at the very utmost, it flags--fails--a
revulsion ensues--and then the poem is, in effect, and in fact, no longer such."
In another passage, from the essay on
"Hawthorne's 'Twice-Told Tales,'" Poe emphasizes this law of brevity in connection with the law of unity of impression. It is one
of the classic passages of American literary criticism:
"Were we bidden to say how the highest genius could be
most advantageously employed for the best display of its own powers, we should answer, without hesitation--in the composition of
a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour. Within this limit alone can the highest order of true
poetry exist. We need only here say, upon this topic, that, in almost all classes of composition, the unity of effect or
impression is a point of the greatest importance. It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in
productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting. We may continue the reading of a prose composition, from the very
nature of prose itself, much longer than we can preserve, to any good purpose, in the perusal of a poem. This latter, if truly
fulfilling the demands of the poetic sentiment, induces an exaltation of the soul which cannot be long sustained. All high
excitements are necessarily transient. Thus a long poem is a paradox. And, without unity of impression, the deepest effects
cannot be brought about. Epics were the offspring of an imperfect sense of Art, and their reign is no more. A poem too
brief may produce a vivid, but never an intense or enduring impression. Without a certain continuity of effort--without a certain
duration or repetition of purpose--the soul is never deeply moved."
Gray's analysis of the law of lyric brevity is
picturesque, and too little known:
"The true lyric style, with all its flights of fancy, ornaments, and heightening
of expression, and harmony of sound, is in its nature superior to every other style; which is just the cause why it could not be
borne in a work of great length, no more than the eye could bear to see all this scene that we constantly gaze upon,--the verdure
of the fields and woods, the azure of the sea-skies, turned into one dazzling expanse of gems. The epic, therefore, assumed a
style of graver colors, and only stuck on a diamond (borrowed from her sister) here and there, where it best became her.... To
pass on a sudden from the lyric glare to the epic solemnity (if I may be allowed to talk nonsense)...." [Footnote: Gray's
Letters, vol. 2, p. 304. (Gosse ed.)]
It is evident that the laws of brevity and unity cannot be
disassociated. The unity of emotion which characterizes the successful lyric corresponds to the unity of action in the drama, and
to the unity of effect in the short story. It is this fact which Palgrave stressed in his emphasis upon "some single thought,
feeling, or situation." The sonnets, for instance, that most nearly approach perfection are those dominated by one thought. This
thought may be turned over, indeed, as the octave passes into the sextet, and may be viewed from another angle, or applied in an
unexpected way. And yet the content of a sonnet, considered as a whole, must be as integral as the sonnet's form. So must it be
with any song. The various devices of rhyme, stanza and refrain help to bind into oneness of form a single emotional reflection
of some situation or desire.
Watts-Dunton points out that there is also a law of simplicity of grammatical structure which the
lyric disregards at its peril. Browning and Shelley, to mention no lesser names, often marred the effectiveness of their lyrics
by a lack of perspicuity. If the lyric cry is not easily intelligible, the sympathy of the listener is not won. Riddle-poems have
been loved by the English ever since Anglo-Saxon times, but the intellectual satisfaction of solving a puzzle may be purchased at
the cost of true poetic pleasure. Let us quote Gray once more, for he had an unerring sense of the difficulty of moulding ideas
into "pure, perspicuous and musical form."
"Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and
musical, is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry. This I have always aimed at, and never could attain; the necessity of
rhyming is one great obstacle to it: another and perhaps a stronger is, that way you have chosen of casting down your first ideas
carelessly and at large, and then clipping them here and there, and forming them at leisure; this method, after all possible
pains, will leave behind it in some places a laxity, a diffuseness; the frame of a thought (otherwise well invented, well turned,
and well placed) is often weakened by it. Do I talk nonsense, or do you understand me?" [Footnote: Gray's Letters, vol. 2,
p. 352. (Gosse ed.)]
Poe, whose theory of poetry comprehends only the lyric, and indeed chiefly that restricted
type of lyric verse in which he himself was a master, insisted that there was a further lyric law,--the law of vagueness or
indefiniteness. "I know," he writes in his "Marginalia," "that indefiniteness is an element of the true music--I mean of the true
musical expression. Give to it any undue decision--imbue it with any very determinate tone--and you deprive it, at once, of its
ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character. You dispel its luxury of dream. You dissolve the atmosphere of the
mystic upon which it floats. You exhaust it of its breath of faëry. It now becomes a tangible and easily appreciable idea--a
thing of the earth, earthy."
This reads like a defence of Poe's own private practice, and yet many poets and critics are
inclined to side with him. Edmond Holmes, for instance, goes quite as far as Poe. "The truth is that poetry, which is the
expression of large, obscure and indefinable feelings, finds its appropriate material in
vague words--words of large
import and with many meanings and shades of meaning. Here we have an almost unfailing test for determining the poetic fitness of
words, a test which every true poet unconsciously, but withal unerringly, applies. Precision, whether in the direction of what is
commonplace or of what is technical, is always unpoetical." [Footnote:
What is Poetry, p. 77. London and New York, 1900.]
This doctrine, it will be observed, is in direct opposition to the Imagist theory of "hardness and economy of speech; the exact
word," and it also would rule out the highly technical vocabulary of camp and trail, steamship and jungle, with which Mr. Kipling
has greatly delighted our generation. No one who admires the splendid vitality of "McAndrew's Hymn" is really troubled by the
slang and lingo of the engine-room.
One of the most charming passages in Stedman's
Nature and Elements of Poetry (pp.
181-85) deals with the law of Evanescence. The "flowers that fade," the "airs that die," "the snows of yester-year," have in
their very frailty and mortality a haunting lyric value. Don Marquis has written a poem about this exquisite appeal of the
transient, calling it "The Paradox":
"'T is evanescence that endures;
The loveliness that dies the soonest has the longest
life."
But we touch here a source of lyric beauty too delicate to be analysed in prose. It is better to read "Rose Aylmer," or
to remember what Duke Orsino says in Twelfth Night:
"Enough; no more:
'T is not so sweet now as it was
before."
7. Expression and Impulse
A word must be added, nevertheless, about lyric expression as related to the lyric
impulse. No one pretends that there is such a thing as a set lyric pattern.
"There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing
tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right."
No two professional golfers, for instance, take precisely the same
stance. Each man's stance is the expression, the result, of his peculiar physical organization and his muscular habits. There are
as many "styles" as there are players, and yet each player strives for "style," i.e. economy and precision and grace of muscular
effort, and each will assert that the chief thing is to "keep your eye on the ball" and "follow through." "And every single one
of them is right."
Apply this analogy to the organization of a lyric poem. Its material, as we have seen, is infinitely varied.
It expresses all conceivable "states of soul." Is it possible, therefore, to lay down any general formula for it, something
corresponding to the golfer's "keep your eye on the ball" and "follow through"? John Erskine, in his book on
The Elizabethan
Lyric, ventures upon this precept: "Lyric emotion, in order to express itself intelligibly, must first reproduce the cause of
its existence. If the poet will go into ecstasies over a Grecian urn, to justify himself he must first show us the urn."
Admitted. Can one go farther? Mr. Erskine attempts it, in a highly suggestive analysis: "Speaking broadly, all successful lyrics
have three parts. In the first the emotional stimulus is given--the object, the situation, or the thought from which the song
arises. In the second part the emotion is developed to its utmost capacity, until as it begins to flag the intellectual element
reasserts itself. In the third part the emotion is finally resolved into a thought, a mental resolution, or an attribute."
[Footnote:
The Elizabethan Lyric, p. 17.] Let the reader choose at random a dozen lyrics from the
Golden Treasury,
and see how far this orderly arrangement of the thought-stuff of the lyric is approximated in practice. My own impression is that
the critic postulates more of an "intellectual element" than the average English song will supply. But at least here is a clear-
cut statement of what one may look for in a lyric. It shows how the lyric impulse tends to mould lyric expression into certain
lines of order.
Most of the narrower precepts governing lyric form follow from the general principles already discussed. The
lyric vocabulary, every one admits, should not seem studied or consciously ornate, for that breaks the law of spontaneity. It may
indeed be highly finished, the more highly in proportion to its brevity, but the clever word-juggling of such prestidigitators as
Poe and Verlaine is perilous. Figurative language must spring only from living, figurative thought, otherwise the lyric falls
into verbal conceits, frigidity, conventionality. Stanzaic law must follow emotional law, just as Kreisler's accompanist must
keep time with Kreisler. All the rich devices of rhyme and tone-color must heighten and not cloy the singing quality. But why
lengthen this list of truisms? The combination of genuine lyric emotion with expertness of technical expression is in reality
very rare. Goethe's "Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh" and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" are miracles of art, yet one was scribbled in a
moment, and the other dreamed in an opium slumber. The lyric is the commonest, and yet, in its perfection, the rarest type of
poetry; the earliest, and yet the most modern; the simplest, and yet in its laws of emotional association, perhaps the most
complex; and it is all these because it expresses, more intimately than other types of verse, the personality of the poet. _