The Lyric: An Essay

     While, therefore, the term "lyric poetry" would in itself seem to be tautological, and so to speak of lyric forms is, strictly, to speak of all poetic forms, there are nevertheless certain more or less defined characteristics of form that we usually connect in our mind with what we call "a lyric" (or, even less exactly, "lyric poetry") which may be said to be a poem where the pure poetic energy is not notably associated with other energies—with a partial exception to which reference will be made. In examining these characteristics nothing will be attempted in the way of a history or an inclusive consideration of particular forms which are known as lyric, but only, as far as may be, an analysis of their governing principles.

     To say that a lyric (using the word henceforward in its particular sense) is generally short is but to say that poetic tension can only be sustained for a short time. Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just. What happens, I think, is this. The poetic mood, selecting a subject, records its perception of that subject, the result is a lyric, and the mood passes. On its recurrence another subject is selected and the process repeated. But if another energy than the purely poetic, the energy of co-ordination of which I have spoken, comes into operation, there will be a desire in the poet to link the records of his recurrent poetic perceptions together, and so to construct many poems into a connected whole. Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them. The decision that the material used at one occurrence of the poetic mood shall be related to the material used at the next is not in itself an operation of the purely poetic energy, but of another.

     The present purpose is, however, to consider the general character of forms used by poets when they choose to leave each successive record of poetic experience in isolation. I have said that any translation of emotion into poetry—it might be said, into any intelligible expression—necessarily implies a certain co-operation of intellectual control. If we take even a detached phrase so directly and obviously emotional in source as:

          I die, I faint, I fail!

it is clear that the setting out those words is not merely an emotional act. But intellectual control of this kind is not identical with that intellectual relating of one part to another of which we have been speaking, which we may call co-ordination. Of all energies, however, the co-ordinating energy is the one with which the poetic energy is most instinctively in sympathy, and it is in this connection that I made a partial exception when I said that a lyric was a poem where the pure poetic energy was not notably associated with other energies. When a poet writes a poem of corresponding lines and stanzas or in a form of which the structural outline is decided by a definable law—as in the sonnet—he is in effect obeying the impulse of the co-ordinating energy, and the use of rhyme is another sign of obedience to the same impulse. It so happens that this energy, next to the poetic energy, is the most impressive and satisfying of all mental activities, and while poetry may exist independently of it, the fact remains that it very rarely does so. A very curious fallacy about this matter has sometimes obtained support. The adherents of what is called free verse, not content, as they should thankfully be, if they can achieve poetry in their chosen medium, are sometimes tempted to claim that it is the peculiar virtue of their manner—which, let me say it again, may be entirely admirable—that it enables the structure of verse to keep in constant correspondence with change of emotion. The notion is, of course, a very convenient one when you wish to escape the very exacting conditions of formal control, and have not the patience or capacity to understand their difficulties, and that it is professed by many who do so wish is doubtless. But there are other serious and gifted people, loyally trying to serve a great art, who hold this view, and on their account consideration is due to it. But it is none the less a fallacy, and doubly so. In the first place, the change of line-lengths and rhythms in a short poem written in "free verse" is nearly always arbitrary, and does not succeed in doing what is claimed for it in this direction, while it often does succeed in distressing the ear and so obscuring the sense, though that is by the way. It is not as though given rhythms and line-lengths had any peculiar emotional significance attached to them. A dirge may be in racing anapæsts, laughter in the most sedate iambic measure; a solemn invocation may move in rapid three-foot lines, while grave heroic verse may contain the gayest of humours. In a long work, indeed, variety of structure may be used to give variety of sensation to the ear with delightful and sometimes even necessary effect, though—in English, and I am always speaking of English—it cannot even then be used with any certainty to express change of emotion. But in a lyric the ear does not demand this kind of relief. With many of us, at least, it accepts and even demands an unbroken external symmetry. The symmetry may be externally simple, as in, say, the stanzas of Heraclitus:

  They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;
  They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.
  I wept as I remembered how often you and I
  Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

  And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
  A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
  Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales awake,
  For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take,

or intricate, as in:

  Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy,
  Sphere-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and Verse,
  Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ
  Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce;
  And to our high-raised phantasy present
  That undisturbed song of pure content,
  Aye sung before the sapphire-colour'd throne
        To Him that sits thereon
  With saintly shout and solemn jubilee;
  Where the bright Seraphim in burning row
  Their loud-uplifted angel-trumpets blow;
  And the Cherubic host in thousand quires
  Touch their immortal harps of golden wires,
  With those just Spirits that wear victorious palms,
        Hymns devout and holy psalms
        Singing everlastingly:

in either case there is a formal and easily perceptible relation between one part of the structure and another, and this relation is a positive help to us in understanding the plain sense of the words, while its presence does not involve any loss of emotional significance which its absence would supply. The truth is—and here is the second and chief objection to the claim that we are discussing—that the poetic mood, which is what is expressed by the rhythm and form of verse and may very well be called the emotion of poetry, is not at all the same thing as what are commonly called the emotions—as happiness, despair, love, hate and the rest. Its colour will vary between one poet and another, but in one poet it will be relatively fixed in quality, while these other emotions are but material upon which, in common with many other things, it may work. And being a relatively fixed condition, it is, for its part, in no need of changing metrical devices for its expression, and to maintain that the "emotions," subjects of its activity, should have in their alternation a corresponding alternation of metrical device is no more reasonable than to maintain that other subjects of its activity should be so treated; it is to forget, for example, that when Shakespeare wrote:

      Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
        Nor the furious winter's rages:
      Thou thy worldly task hast done,
        Home art gone and ta'en thy wages:
      Golden lads and girls all must,
        As chimney-sweepers, come to dust,

it was his subject-matter that changed from line to line and not the poetic emotion governing it, and to say that he ought to have made the metrical and rhythmic form of the first line in itself suggest heat: of the second, rough weather: of the third, work: of the fourth, wages: and of the fifth and sixth the death of golden lads and girls and of chimney-sweepers respectively, all things manifestly very different from each other, and things which, if it were the function of verbal rhythms and metres to do this sort of thing at all, could not with any propriety have the closely related equivalents that they have here. No; to ask for this kind of effect is really to ask for nothing more valuable than the devotional crosses and altars into which a perverted wit led some of the seventeenth-century poets to contrive their verses in unhappy moments, or Southey's Lodore, in which there is a fond pretence that verbal rhythms are water.[3] It is just as difficult to explain why verbal rhythms will not perform this function as it is to explain why the moon is not a green cheese.

          3: Most poets will occasionally use onomatopoeia with success, but this is a different matter, and even so it is quite an inessential poetic device. One might sometimes suppose from what we are told, that Virgil's chief claim to poetry was the fact that he once made a line of verse resemble the movement of a horse's hoofs.

     But while it is true that the function of the rhythm of poetry is to express the governing poetic emotion, and that, since the emotion in itself is fixed rather than changing, it will best do this not by mere irregularity, but by flexible movement that is contained in an external symmetry, it does not follow at all that the subject-matter which the poetic emotion is controlling, be it the "emotions" or anything else, cannot hope for expression that catches its peculiar properties. To do this in poetry is the supreme distinction not of rhythms, but of words. The preponderance of the five-foot blank-verse line in the work of, say, Shakespeare and Milton, is so great that we can safely say that their rank as poets would not be lower than it is if they had written nothing else. Clearly their constancy to this metre was not the result of any technical deficiency. Even if Milton had not written the choruses of Samson Agonistes and Shakespeare his songs, nobody would be so absurd as to suggest that they adopted this five-foot line and spent their mighty artistry in sending supple and flowing variety through its external uniformity, because they could not manage any other. They used it because they found that its rhythm perfectly expressed their poetic emotion, and because the formal relation of one line to another satisfied the instinct for co-ordination, and for the full expression of the significance of their subject-matter they relied not upon their rhythms, but upon their choice of words. The belief that when a poem is written there is one and only one metrical scheme that could possibly be used for that particular occasion is an amiable delusion that should be laid aside with such notions as that the poet makes his breakfast on dew and manna. Once the poem is written we may feel indeed, if it be a good one, that any change in the form is impossible, but when the poet was about to write it we may be sure that he quite deliberately weighed one form against another before making his choice. It may even be true that he will sometimes find the shape of his poem running to his tongue as it were unbidden, but this certainty of selection is really in itself the result of long and, perhaps, subconscious deliberation. The point is that the chosen form must in any case express the poetic emotion, but that its particular election is a personal whim, wholly satisfactory in its result, rather than a divine necessity. The Ode to the West Wind and the Stanzas written in Dejection are both superb poems, but who shall say that Shelley might not have written the former in the short-measured nine-line stanzas and the latter in his terza-rima, and yet have embodied his poetic emotion as completely as he has done? It need hardly be added that it does not follow that, because a simple metrical outline may easily and justly be chosen, it can easily be used. So plain a measure as the six-line octo-syllabic stanza may be the merest unintelligent jog-trot, or it may be:

      I wander'd lonely as a cloud
      That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
      When all at once I saw a crowd,
      A host, of golden daffodils;
      Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
      Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

     We may now consider this question of the subject-matter and its expression in words. When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life. He has something in his mind, subjected to his poetic vision, and his problem is to find words that will compel us to realise the significance of that something. To solve this problem is his last and most exacting difficulty, demanding a continual wariness and the closest discipline. When Homer nodded, another man's word came to his lips, and when that happens the poet may as well be silent. No poet has been wholly blameless of this relaxation or escaped its penalties, but it is by his vigilance in this matter that we measure his virility.

     I suppose everyone knows the feeling that sometimes calls us to a life where we fend and cater for ourselves in the fields and rivers, such as William Morris knew when he shot fieldfares with his bow and arrow and cooked them for his supper. Shakespeare knew it too, in the mind of Caliban, and his business was to realise this subject-matter for us in such a way that it could not possibly escape us in vague generalisation. Its appeal to our perceptions must be irresistible. He can do it only by the perfect choice of words, thus:

Every word sings with life, and the whole passage shows perfectly the function of words in poetry. The peculiar delight which we get from such a passage as this comes, I think, apart from its fundamental poetic quality, from the fact that the subject-matter is of such general interest as constantly to tempt incomplete perception to inadequate expression. Consequently when we get an expression which is complete our pleasure has an added surprise. "Show thee a jay's nest"; it is strangely simple, but it is revelation. Or let us take a case where the subject-matter is one of the emotions of which we have spoken; the emotion that marks the pity of parting at death:

        I am dying, Egypt, dying:

the use of that one word, Egypt, should answer for ever the people who think that the subject-matter of poetry is to be expressed by rhythm.

     Thus we have rhythm expressing the poetic emotion, or intensity of perception, and words expressing the thing that is intensely perceived; so, as the creed of the mystics shows us beauty born of the exact fusion of thought with feeling, of perfect correspondence of the strictly chosen words to the rhythmic movement is born the complete form of poetry. And when this perfect correspondence occurs unaccompanied by any other energy—save, perhaps, the co-ordinating energy of which I have spoken—we have pure poetry and what is commonly in our minds when we think of lyric. If it be objected that some of my illustrations, that speech of Caliban's for example, are taken from "dramatic poetry" and not from "lyric poetry," my answer is that it is impossible to discover any essential difference between those lines and any authentic poem that is known as "a lyric." The kind of difference that there is can be found also between any two lyrics; it is accidental, resulting from difference of personality and subject-matter, and the essential poetic intensity, which is the thing that concerns us, is of the same nature in both cases. Any general term that can fitly be applied to, say, the Ode to The West Wind can be applied with equal fitness to Caliban's island lore. Both are poetry, springing from the same imaginative activity, living through the same perfect selection and ordering of words, and, in our response, quickening the same ecstasy. Although we are accustomed to look rather for the rhymed and stanzaic movement of the former in a lyric than for the stricter economy and uniformity of Caliban's blank verse, yet both have the essential qualities of lyric—of pure poetry.

     It may be protested that after all the peculiar property of lyric, differentiating it from other kinds of poetry, is that it is song. If we dismiss the association of the art of poetry with the art of music, as we may well do, I think the protest is left without any significance. In English, at any rate, there is hardly any verse—a few Elizabethan poems only—written expressly to be sung and not to be spoken, that has any importance as poetry, and even the exceptions have their poetic value quite independently of their musical setting. For the rest, whenever a true poem is given a musical setting, the strictly poetic quality is destroyed. The musician—if he be a good one—finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music. The result may be, and often is, of rare beauty and of an artistic significance as great, perhaps, as that of the poem itself, and the poet is mistaken in refusing, as he often does,[4] to be the cause of the liberation of this new and admirable activity in others. But, in the hands of the musician, once a poem has served this purpose, it has, as poetry, no further existence. It is well that the musician should use fine poetry and not bad verse as his inspiration, for obvious reasons, but when the poetry has so quickened him it is of no further importance in his art save as a means of exercising a beautiful instrument, the human voice. It is unnecessary to discuss the relative functions of two great arts, wholly different in their methods, different in their scope. But it is futile to attempt to blend the two.

      4: His refusal is commonly due to lamentable experience. If a Shelley is willing to lend his suggestions to the musician, he has some right to demand that the musician shall be a Wolf. The condition of his allowing his poem to be used and destroyed in the process is, rightly, that something of equal nobility shall be wrought of its dust.

     As far as my indifferent understanding of the musician's art will allow me I delight in and reverence it, and the singing human voice seems to me to be, perhaps, the most exquisite instrument that the musician can command. But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry. If the song be good, I do not care whether the words are German, which I cannot understand, or English, which I can. On the whole I think I prefer not to understand them, since I am then not distracted by thoughts of another art.

     If then from the argument about the lyric that it should "sing," we dismiss this particular meaning of its adaptability to music, what have we left? It cannot be that it peculiarly should be rhythmic, since we have seen that to be this is of the essential nature of all poetry—that rhythm is, indeed, necessary to the expression of the poetic emotion itself. It cannot be that it peculiarly should be of passionate intensity, since again, this we have seen to be the condition of all poetry. In short, it can mean nothing that cannot with equal justice be said of poetry wherever it may be found. To the ear that is worthy of poetry the majestic verse of the great passages in Paradise Lost, the fierce passion of Antony and Macbeth, the movement of the poetry in Sigurd the Volsung, "sing" as surely as the lyrics of the Elizabethans or of Poems and Ballads. Poetry must give of its essential qualities at all times, and we cannot justly demand that at any time it should give us more than these.

     Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course. We often hear people say, sincerely enough, that they feel no response to poetry. This nearly always means that their natural feeling for poetry has been vitiated in some way, generally by contact, often forced upon them, with work that only masquerades as poetry, or by such misgovernment of their lives as dulls all their finer instincts. Unless it be wholly numbed in some such way, the delight of poetry is ready to quicken in almost every man; and with a little use it will quicken only to what is worthy. And lyric being pure poetry, and most commonly found in isolation in the short poems which are called lyrics, these will make the widest appeal of all the forms in which poetry is found. For while sympathy with the poetic energy is almost universal, sympathy with most other great energies is relatively rare. The reason, for example, why twenty people will enjoy Wordsworth's Reaper for one who will enjoy Paradise Lost, is not because Paradise Lost is longer, but because it demands for its full appreciation not only, in common with The Reaper, a sympathy with the poetic energy, which it would obtain readily enough, but also a sympathy with that other energy of intellectual control which has been discussed. This energy being, though profoundly significant, yet far less so than the poetic energy, the response to it is far less general, and many readers of Paradise Lost will find in it not only poetry, which they desire but faintly, while in The Reaper they will find poetry as nearly isolated from all other energies as it can be.

     To summarise our argument, we find that poetry is the result of the intensest emotional activity attainable by man focusing itself upon some manifestation of life, and experiencing that manifestation completely; that the emotion of poetry expresses itself in rhythm and that the significance of the subject-matter is realised by the intellectual choice of the perfect word. We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order—poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible. But since it is most commonly found by itself in short poems which we call lyric, we may say that the characteristic of the lyric is that it is the product of the pure poetic energy unassociated with other energies, and that lyric and poetry are synonymous terms.