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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Lyric, by John Drinkwater
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Lyric
+       An Essay
+
+Author: John Drinkwater
+
+Posting Date: October 24, 2011 [EBook #9850]
+Release Date: February, 2006
+First Posted: October 24, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LYRIC ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Thierry Alberto and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LYRIC
+
+AN ESSAY BY JOHN DRINKWATER
+
+
+1922
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+What is Poetry
+
+The Best Words in the Best Order
+
+The Degrees of Poetry
+
+Paradise Lost
+
+What is Lyric
+
+The Classification of Poetry
+
+Lyric Forms
+
+Song
+
+The Popularity of Lyric
+
+Conclusion
+
+
+
+
+WHAT IS POETRY?
+
+
+If you were to ask twenty intelligent people, "What is the Thames?" the
+answer due to you from each would be--"a river." And yet this would hardly
+be matter to satisfy your enquiring mind. You would more probably say,
+"What do you know of the Thames?" or, "Describe the Thames to me." This
+would bring you a great variety of opinions, many dissertations on
+geological and national history, many words in praise of beauty, many
+personal confessions. Here would be the revelation of many minds
+approaching a great subject in as many manners, confirming and
+contradicting each other, making on the whole some impression of cumulative
+judgment, giving you many clues to what might be called the truth, no one
+of them by itself coming near to anything like full knowledge, and the
+final word would inevitably be left unsaid.
+
+The question, "What is poetry?" has been answered innumerable times, often
+by the subtlest and clearest minds, and as many times has it been answered
+differently. The answer in itself now makes a large and distinguished
+literature to which, full as it is of keen intelligence and even of
+constructive vision, we can return with unstaling pleasure. The very poets
+themselves, it is true, lending their wits to the debate, have left the
+answer incomplete, as it must--not in the least unhappily--always remain.
+And yet, if we consider the matter for a moment, we find that all this
+wisdom, prospering from Sidney's _Apology_ until to-day, does not
+strictly attempt to answer the question that is put. It does not tell us
+singly what poetry is, but it speculates upon the cause and effect of
+poetry. It enquires into the impulse that moves the poet to creation and
+describes, as far as individual limitations will allow, the way in which
+the poet's work impresses the world. When Wordsworth says "poetry is the
+breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," he is, exactly, in one intuitive
+word, telling us how poetry comes into being, directing us with an inspired
+gesture to its source, and not strictly telling us what it is; and so
+Shelley tells us in his fiery eloquence of the divine functions of poetry.
+But poetry is, in its naked being and apart from its cause and effect, a
+certain use of words, and, remembering this simple fact, there has been
+one perfect and final answer to the question, "What is poetry?" It was
+Coleridge's: "Poetry--the best words in the best order."
+
+
+
+THE BEST WORDS IN THE BEST ORDER
+
+
+This is the fundamental thing to be remembered when considering the art of
+poetry as such. The whole question of what causes a poet to say this or
+that and of the impression that is thence made upon us can be definitely
+narrowed down to the question "How does he say it?" The manner of his
+utterance is, indeed, the sole evidence before us. To know anything of
+a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know
+something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly
+inessential. The written word is everything. If it is an imperfect word, no
+external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry. We may at times,
+knowing of honourable and inspiriting things in a poet's life, read into
+his imperfect word a value that it does not possess. When we do this our
+judgment of poetry is inert; we are not getting pleasure from his work
+because it is poetry, but for quite other reasons. It may be a quite
+wholesome pleasure, but it is not the high aesthetic pleasure which the
+people who experience it generally believe to be the richest and most vivid
+of all pleasures because it is experienced by a mental state that is more
+eager and masterful than any other. Nor is our judgment acute when we
+praise a poet's work because it chimes with unexpected precision to some
+particular belief or experience of our own or because it directs us by
+suggestion to something dear to our personal affections. Again the poet is
+giving us delight, but not the delight of poetry. We have to consider this
+alone--the poet has something to say: does he say it in the best words in
+the best order? By that, and by that alone, is he to be judged.
+
+For it is to be remembered that this achievement of the best words in the
+best order is, perhaps, the rarest to which man can reach, implying as it
+does a coincidence of unfettered imaginative ecstasy with superb mental
+poise. The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience;
+what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way,
+that is, completely. He has felt it with an imaginative urgency so great as
+to quicken his brain to this flawless ordering of the best words, and it
+is that ordering and that alone which communicates to us the ecstasy, and
+gives us the supreme delight of poetry. It should here be added that poetry
+habitually takes the form of verse. It is, perhaps, profitless to attempt
+any analysis of the emotional law that directs this choice, nor need it
+arbitrarily be said that poetry must of necessity be verse. But it is a
+fact, sufficiently founded on experience, that the intensity of vision that
+demands and achieves nothing less than the best words in the best order for
+its expression does instinctively select the definitely patterned rhythm
+of verse as being the most apt for its purpose. We find, then, that the
+condition of poetry as defined by Coleridge implies exactly what the
+trained judgment holds poetry to be. It implies the highest attainable
+intensity of vision, which, by the sanction of almost universal example,
+casts its best ordering of the best words into the form of verse. Ruskin
+wrote, with fine spiritual ardour--
+
+"... women of England! ...do not think your daughters can be trained to the
+truth of their own human beauty, while the pleasant places, which God
+made at once for their schoolroom and their playground, lie desolate and
+defiled. You cannot baptize them rightly in those inch-deep founts of
+yours, unless you baptize them also in the sweet waters which the great
+Lawgiver strikes forth for ever from the rocks of your native land--waters
+which a Pagan would have worshipped in their purity, and you worship only
+with pollution. You cannot lead your children faithfully to those narrow
+axe-hewn church altars of yours, while the dark azure altars in heaven--the
+mountains that sustain your island throne--mountains on which a Pagan would
+have seen the powers of heaven rest in every wreathed cloud--remain for you
+without inscription; altars built, not to, but by an unknown God."
+
+Here we have, we may say, words in their best order--Coleridge's equally
+admirable definition of prose. It is splendid prose, won only from great
+nobility of emotion. But it is not poetry, not the best words in the best
+order announcing that the feeling expressed has been experienced with the
+highest intensity possible to the mind of man. The tenderness for earth and
+its people and the heroic determination not to watch their defilement in
+silence, have been deeply significant things to Ruskin, moving him to
+excellent words. But could they be more strictly experienced, yet more
+deeply significant, shaping yet more excellent words? Blake gives us the
+answer:
+
+  And did those feet in ancient time
+    Walk upon England's mountains green?
+  And was the holy Lamb of God
+    On England's pleasant pastures seen?
+
+  And did the Countenance Divine
+    Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
+  And was Jerusalem builded here
+    Among these dark Satanic mills?
+
+  Bring me my bow of burning gold!
+    Bring me my arrows of desire!
+  Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
+    Bring me my chariot of fire!
+
+  I will not cease from mental fight,
+    Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
+  Till we have built Jerusalem
+    In England's green and pleasant land.
+
+It may be suggested that, for their purpose, Ruskin's words are perfectly
+chosen, that as a direct social charge they achieve their purpose better
+than any others that could have been shaped. Even if we allow this and
+do not press, as we very reasonably might, the reply that merely in this
+direction Blake's poem working, as is the manner of all great art, with
+tremendous but secret vigour upon the imagination of the people, has a
+deeper and more permanent effect than Ruskin's prose, we still remember
+that the sole purpose of poetry is to produce the virile spiritual
+activity that we call aesthetic delight and that to do this is the highest
+achievement to which the faculties of man can attain. If by "the best
+words" we mean anything, we must mean the best words for the highest
+possible purpose. To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic
+government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely
+fulfills the highest function of a government--the realisation of the will
+of the people. But it is also a function of government to organise the
+people and--although, just as we may think that Blake's poem finally
+beats Ruskin's prose on Ruskin's own ground, we may think, too, that the
+government that best represents the people will finally best organise
+the people--it may quite plausibly be said that in this business an
+aristocratic or militant government will, in an imperfectly conditioned
+civilisation (such as that of the world to-day), excel a democratic
+government. Nevertheless, we still say with an easy mind that a democratic
+government is the best government, without qualification, since it excels
+in the highest purpose of government. Clearly Coleridge implies, and
+reasonably enough, an elaboration such as this in his definition--the best
+words in the best order. To say that Blake and Ruskin, in those passages,
+were giving expression to dissimilar experiences is but to emphasise the
+distinction between prose and poetry. The closest analysis discovers no
+difference between the essential thought of the one and the other. But
+Blake projected the thought through a mood of higher intensity, and, where
+Ruskin perfectly ordered admirable words, he perfectly ordered the
+best words. It is the controlling mood that differs, not the material
+controlled. Hence it is that still another mind, starting from the same
+radical perception, might transfigure it through a mood as urgent as
+Blake's and produce yet another poem of which it could strictly be said
+that here again were the best words in the best order. We should then
+have three men moved by the same thought; in the one case the imaginative
+shaping of the thought would fail to reach the point at which the record
+and communication of ecstasy become the chief intention, and the expression
+would be prose; in each of the other cases the shaping would pass beyond
+that point, and there would be two separate moods expressed, each in the
+terms of poetry.
+
+One further qualification remains to be made. By words we must mean, as
+Coleridge must have meant, words used for a purpose which they alone can
+serve. Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences
+that can be communicated in no other way. If you ask me the time, and I
+say--it is six o'clock, it may be said that I am using the best words in
+the best order, and that, although the thought in my mind is incapable of
+being refined into the higher aesthetic experience of which we have spoken,
+my answer is, if Coleridge was right, poetry. But these are not, in our
+present sense, words at all. They have no power which is peculiar to
+themselves. If I show you my watch you are answered just as effectively.
+
+That there is no absolute standard for reference does not matter. All
+aesthetic appreciation and opinion can but depend upon our judgment,
+fortified by knowledge of what is, by cumulative consent, the best that has
+been done. There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best
+words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and
+judgment, that it is so. And the conviction is, exactly, the conviction
+that the mood to which the matter has been subjected has been of such a
+kind as to achieve an intensity beyond which we cannot conceive the mind as
+passing, and it follows that there may be--as indeed there are--many poems
+dealing with the same subject each of which fulfills the obligations of
+poetry as defined by Coleridge. For while the subjects of poetry are few
+and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is
+the same in all arts. If six masters paint the same landscape and under
+the same conditions, there will be one subject but six visions, and
+consequently six different interpretations, each one of which may, given
+the mastery, satisfy us as being perfect; perfect, that is, not as the
+expression of a subject which has no independent artistic existence, but as
+the expression of the mood in which the subject is realised. So it is in
+poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having
+been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do
+this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant
+verse.
+
+
+
+THE DEGREES OF POETRY
+
+
+The question that necessarily follows these reflections is--Are there
+degrees in poetry? Since a short lyric may completely satisfy the
+requirements of poetry as here set down, announcing itself to have been
+created in a poetic or supremely intensified mood, can poetry be said at
+any time to go beyond this? If we accept these conclusions, can a thing so
+slight, yet so exquisite, so obviously authentic in source as:
+
+    When I a verse shall make,
+      Know I have pray'd thee,
+    For old religion's sake,
+      Saint Ben, to aid me.
+
+    Make the way smooth for me,
+      When I, thy Herrick,
+    Honouring thee, on my knee
+      Offer my lyric.
+
+    Candles I'll give to thee,
+      And a new altar,
+    And thou, Saint Ben, shall be
+      Writ in my Psalter,
+
+be said to be less definitely poetry than _Paradise Lost_ or in any
+essentially poetic way below it? The logical answer is, no; and I think it
+is the right one. In considering it we should come to an understanding of
+the nature of lyric, the purpose of this essay. But first let us see how
+far it may be justifiable.
+
+
+
+PARADISE LOST
+
+
+It is commonly asserted and accepted that _Paradise Lost_ is among the
+two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of
+supreme poetic achievement in our literature. What are the qualities by
+virtue of which this claim is made, and allowed by every competent judge?
+Firstly there is the witness of that ecstasy of mood of which we have
+spoken.
+
+  His praise, ye Winds, that from four quarters blow,
+  Breathe soft or loud: and wave your tops, ye Pines,
+  With every plant, in sign of worship wave.
+  Fountains, and ye that warble, as ye flow,
+  Melodious murmurs, warbling tune his praise.
+  Join voices all ye living Souls. Ye Birds,
+  That, singing, up to Heaven-gate ascend,
+  Bear on your wings and in your notes his praise.
+  Ye that in waters glide, and ye that walk
+  The earth, and stately tread, or lowly creep,
+  Witness if I be silent, morn or even,
+  To hill or valley, fountain, or fresh shade,
+  Made vocal by my song, and taught his praise.
+
+This note of high imaginative tension is persistent throughout the poem,
+and that it should be so masterfully sustained is in itself cause for
+delighted admiration. But to be constant in a virtue is not to enhance
+its quality. Superbly furnished as _Paradise Lost_ is with this
+imaginative beauty, the beauty is as rich and unquestionable in the few
+pages of _Lycidas_; there is less of it, that is all. And who shall
+say that it is less ecstatic or less perfect in the little orison to Saint
+Ben? You may prefer Milton's manner, but then you may, with equal reason,
+prefer Herrick's, being grateful for what Keats announced to be truth, in
+whatever shape you may find it. In any case we cannot, on this ground,
+assign a lower place to the poet who could order those words "religion's,"
+"Saint Ben," "Psalter" and the rest of them, with such inspired good
+fortune. And yet we know that _Paradise Lost_ is a greater work than
+this little flight of certain song, greater, too, than the poet's own
+elegy. There is an explanation.
+
+Of all the energies of man, that which I will anticipate my argument by
+calling the poetic energy, the energy that created Herrick's song and the
+distinguishing qualities of that passage from Milton, is the rarest and the
+most highly, if not the most generally, honoured; we have only to think of
+the handful of men who at any time out of all the millions can bring this
+perfect expression to a mood of the highest imaginative intensity, to know
+that the honour is justly bestowed. So splendid a thing is success in
+this matter that failure, if it is matched with a will for sincerity and
+intelligence of purpose, will often bring a man some durable fame. But the
+energies of man are manifold, and while we rightly set the poetic energy
+above the rest, there are others which are only less rare, and in their
+most notable manifestations yielding to it alone in worthiness of homage
+which will, indeed, often be more generally paid. Such an energy is the
+profound intellectual control of material, as distinct from profound
+emotional sensitiveness to material; the capacity for ordering great masses
+of detail into a whole of finely balanced and duly related proportions.
+Caesar and Napoleon had it, marshalling great armies to perfectly conceived
+designs; Fielding had it, using it to draw a multitude of character and
+event into the superbly shaped lines of his story; the greatest political
+leaders have had it; Cromwell had it, organising an enthusiasm; Elizabeth,
+organising a national adventure.[1] Again, there is the energy
+of morality, ardently desiring justice and right fellowship, sublimely
+lived by men who have made goodness great, like Lincoln, sublimely spoken
+by men who made sermons passionate, like Ruskin and Carlyle. To take one
+other instance, there is the highly specialised energy that delights in the
+objective perception of differentiations of character, the chief energy of
+the deftest wits such as Samuel Johnson and the best comic dramatists.
+
+[1: It may be necessary to point out that while the poetic energy
+does not include this architectural power, the intellectual co-ordination
+of large masses of material, it does, of course, include the shapely
+control of the emotion which is its being. It is, indeed, difficult to see
+precisely what can be meant by the suggestion that is often made that the
+emotions can ever be translated into poetic form wholly without the play of
+intellect. If the emotion is intense enough for the creation of poetry at
+all, it will inevitably call up the intellectual power necessary to its
+shaping, otherwise it would be ineffectually diffused. Mr. John Bailey, in
+his masterly if sometimes provoking essay on Milton says, in the midst
+of some admirable remarks on this subject, "It has been said by a living
+writer that 'when reason is subsidiary to emotion verse is the right means
+of expression, and, when emotion to reason, prose.' This is roughly true,
+though the poetry of mere emotion is poor stuff." I would suggest that
+poetry of emotion, in this sense, does not and could not exist. Bad verse
+is merely the evidence of both emotion and intellect that are, so to
+speak, below poetic power, not of emotion divorced from intellect, which
+evaporates unrecorded.]
+
+Any one of these energies, greatly manifested, will compel a just
+admiration; not so great an admiration as the poetic energy, which is
+witness of the highest urgency of individual life, of all things the most
+admirable, but still great. If, further, we consider any one of these
+energies by itself, we shall see that if it were co-existent with the
+poetic energy, the result would be likely to be that, in contact with
+so masterful a force, it would become yet more emphatic, and so a thing
+arresting in itself would become yet more notable under its new dominion.
+And so it is. Fielding's architectural power is a yet more wonderful thing
+in Sophocles, where it is allied to poetic energy; Ruskin's moral fervour
+is, for all its nobility, less memorable than Wordsworth's and Ben Jonson
+defines character more pungently than Sheridan. These energies remain,
+nevertheless, distinct from the poetic energy. When, however, a poet is
+endowed not alone with his own particular gift of poetry, but also with
+some of these other energies--of which there are many--his work very
+rightly is allowed an added greatness. It is so with _Paradise Lost_.
+Of the three energies other than the poetic that I have mentioned, Milton
+had rich measure of two and something of the third. No man has ever
+excelled him either in power of intellectual control or in moral passion,
+and he was not without some sense of character. Consequently we get in
+his great poem, not only the dominating poetic quality which is the chief
+thing, enabling the poet to realise his vision (or mood) perfectly, but
+also the spectacle of a great number of perfectly realised visions being
+related to each other with excellent harmony; we get, further, a great
+moral exaltation--again perfectly realised by the poetic energy, and we
+get, finally, considerable subtlety--far more than is generally allowed--of
+psychological detail. From all these things, the architectonics, the zeal
+for justice and the revelation of character, we get an added and wholesome
+delight which gives Milton's work a place of definitely greater eminence
+than Herrick's song in the record of human activity. In effect, Milton
+besides being a poet, which is the greatest of all distinctions, becomes,
+by possession of those other qualities, a great man as well, and I think
+that this is really what we mean when we speak of a great poet. Without his
+poetic faculty, although he would fall in the scale of human distinction,
+which is not at all the same thing as renown, below, say, so humble a
+personality yet so true a poet as John Clare[2], Milton would still be a
+great man, while Herrick without his poetry would be indistinguishable from
+the crowd. And the great man is as clearly evident in Milton's poetry as he
+is clearly not evident in Herrick's.
+
+[2: It may be asked: "Do you really think that a poet who has left
+no other record of himself than a page or two of songs, even perfect songs,
+can claim a greater distinction than a great man who is not a poet?" Let me
+say, once for all, that I do think so. To have written one perfect song
+is to have given witness and the only kind of witness (in common with the
+media of other arts) that is finally authoritative, that at least one
+supremely exacting mood has been perfectly realised; that is to say, one
+moment of life has been perfectly experienced. And since, with our human
+conception, we can see no good or desirable end beyond the perfect
+experience of life, the man who proves to us that he has done this, no
+matter though it has been but for a moment, is more distinguished--that is,
+more definitely set apart in his own achievement--than the man who, with
+whatever earnestness and nobility, has but proved to us that he desired
+this perfection of experience, even though the desire is exalted by the
+most heroic altruism.]
+
+
+
+WHAT IS LYRIC?
+
+
+And so we have Milton and Herrick, both poets, the one a great man, the
+other not. It is a wide difference. Great men are rare, poets are rarer,
+but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest
+of all events. Milton is one of perhaps a dozen names in the history of the
+world's literature, Herrick--still with a fine enough distinction--one of
+something under two hundred in the history of our own. And yet they are
+left on equal terms in the possession of the purely poetic energy. Milton's
+achievement outweighs Herrick's, but for the reasons that I have mentioned,
+and not because poetry grows better by accumulation or because it is
+possible to prove, or even to satisfy any considerable majority of good
+judges, that--
+
+    Ye have been fresh and green,
+      Ye have been filled with flowers,
+    And ye the walks have been
+      Where maids have spent their hours.
+    You have beheld how they
+      With wicker arks did come
+    To kiss and bear away
+      The richer cowslips home.
+    You've heard them sweetly sing,
+      And seen them in a round:
+    Each virgin like a spring,
+      With honeysuckles crown'd.
+    But now we see none here
+      Whose silvery feet did tread,
+    And with dishevell'd hair
+      Adorn'd this smoother mead.
+    Like unthrifts, having spent
+      Your stock and needy grown,
+    You've left here to lament
+      Your poor estates, alone,
+
+is inferior, in specifically poetic quality, to
+
+  Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,
+  For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
+  Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor;
+  So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
+  And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
+  And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
+  Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.
+
+We come, then, to the consideration of this specific quality that
+distinguishes what we recognise as poetry from all other verbal expression.
+Returning for a moment to _Paradise Lost_, we find that here is a work
+of art of which the visible and external sign is words. That it has three
+qualities--there may be more, but it is not to the point--architectural
+power, moral exaltation and a sense of character, each of which, although
+it may be more impressive when presented as it were under the auspices of
+the poetic quality, can exist independently of it, as in _Tom Jones_,
+_Unto This Last_, and _The School for Scandal_ respectively;
+that there remains a last and dominating quality, which is not related to
+intellectual fusion of much diverse material, as is the first of those
+other qualities, or to the kind of material, as are the other two, but to
+extreme activity of the perceptive mood upon whatever object it may be
+directed, remembering that this activity is highly exacting as to the
+worthiness of objects in which it can concern itself. We find, further,
+that this is a quality which it has in common not with _Tom Jones_
+or _Unto This Last_, but with a thing so inconsiderable in all other
+respects as those songs of Herrick's. And in each case we find that the
+token of this quality is a conviction that here are words that could not
+have been otherwise chosen or otherwise placed; that here is an expression
+to rearrange which would be to destroy it--a conviction that we by no means
+have about the prose of Fielding and Ruskin, admirable as it is. We find,
+in short, that this quality equals a maximum of imaginative pressure
+freeing itself in the best words in the best order. And this quality is the
+specific poetic quality; the presence or absence of which should decide for
+us, without any other consideration whatever, whether what is before us is
+or is not poetry. And it seems to me, further, that what we have in our
+minds when we speak of lyric is precisely this same quality; that lyric and
+the expression of pure poetic energy unrelated to other energies are the
+same thing.
+
+
+
+THE CLASSIFICATION OF POETRY
+
+
+It is not yet the place to discuss the question of lyric forms--to consider
+what kind of thing it is that people mean when they speak of "a lyric."
+First we must consider the commonly accepted opinion that a lyric is an
+expression of personal emotion, with its implication that there is an
+essential difference between a lyric and, say, dramatic or narrative
+poetry. A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but
+then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of
+poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly
+artificial divisions which have no real being. To talk of dramatic
+poetry, epic poetry and narrative poetry is to talk of three different
+things--epic, drama and narrative; but each is combined with a fourth thing
+in common, which is poetry, which, in turn, is in itself of precisely the
+same nature as the lyric of which we are told that it is yet a further
+kind of poetry. Let us here take a passage from a play and consider it in
+relation to this suggestion:
+
+
+CLOWN.      I wish you all joy of the worm.
+
+CLEOPATRA.  Farewell.
+
+CLOWN.      You must think this, look you, that the worm will do his kind.
+
+CLEOPATRA.  Ay, ay; farewell.
+
+CLOWN.      Look you, the worm is not to be trusted but in the keeping of
+              wise people; for indeed there is no goodness in the worm.
+
+CLEOPATRA.  Take thou no care; it shall be heeded.
+
+CLOWN.      Very good. Give it nothing, I pray you, for it is not worth
+              the feeding.
+
+CLEOPATRA.  Will it eat me?
+
+CLOWN.      You must not think I am so simple but I know the devil himself
+              will not eat a woman; I know that a woman is a dish for the
+              gods, if the devil dress her not. But, truly, these same
+              whoreson devils do the gods great harm in their women, for
+              in every ten that they make the devils mar five.
+
+CLEOPATRA.  Well, get thee gone; farewell.
+
+CLOWN.      Yes, forsooth; I wish you joy of the worm.
+
+             _Re-enter_ IRAS.
+
+CLEOPATRA.  Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have
+            Immortal longings in me; now no more
+            The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip.
+            Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear
+            Antony call; I see him rouse himself
+            To praise my noble act; I hear him mock
+            The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men
+            To excuse their after wrath; husband, I come:
+            Now to that name my courage prove my title!
+            I am fire and air; my other elements
+            I give to baser life. So; have you done?
+            Come then, and take the last warmth of my lips.
+            Farewell, kind Charmian; Iras, long farewell.
+
+I have chosen this passage not because of its singular beauty, but because
+it is peculiarly to our present purpose. In the first place, Shakespeare,
+by using both prose and verse--which he by no means always does under
+similar circumstances--makes a clear formal division between what is poetry
+and what is not. It is all magnificently contrived drama, but down to the
+Clown's exit it is not poetry. The significance of the Clown does not
+demand of Shakespeare's imaginative mood that highest activity that would
+force him to poetry. The short dialogue has great excellence, but not this
+kind of excellence. The fact that it occurs in what we call a poetic drama
+does not make it poetry; its fine dramatic significance does not give it
+poetic significance. We are living in a world of dramatic poetry, and
+yet we have here a perfectly clear distinction between the drama and the
+poetry, since we definitely have the one without the other. Then, when
+Cleopatra begins her farewell speech, we have the addition of poetry and
+a continuance of the drama. And this speech illustrates perfectly the
+suggestion that the quality which is commonly said to be exclusively lyric
+is the quality of all poetry. It illustrates it in a particularly
+emphatic way. For not only is it unquestionably poetry, but it is also
+unquestionably dramatic. Very clearly the poet is not here speaking out of
+his own actual experience; it is a woman speaking, one who is a queen: who
+is wrecked upon the love of kings: who knows that she is about to die a
+strange and sudden death. So that if the impulse of the poetry in poetic
+drama were essentially different from the impulse of lyric, if the personal
+experience which is said to be this latter were something differing in kind
+from the experience which is the source of what is called dramatic poetry,
+then here is a case where the essential difference could surely be
+perceived and defined. It cannot be defined, for it does not exist. It is a
+fallacy to suppose that experience is any the less personal because it is
+concerned with an event happening to someone else. If my friend falls to a
+mortal sickness my experience, if my imaginative faculty is acute, is as
+poignant as his; if he achieves some great good fortune, my delight is as
+vigorous as his. And if I am a poet, and choose to express the grief or
+pleasure as if it were his concern and not mine, the experience does not
+become one whit less personal to me. You may, if it is convenient, call the
+result lyric if I speak as though the experience is my own and dramatic
+poetry if I speak of it as being his, but what you are really saying is
+that in the one case I am producing pure poetry, and in the other I am
+producing poetry in conjunction with dramatic statement. The poetic quality
+is the same in either case. Cleopatra's speech is notable for two things:
+its dramatic significance, which is admittedly contrived by Shakespeare,
+and its poetry which springs from an intensity of experience which is
+clearly, unless we juggle with words, Shakespeare's and not Cleopatra's.
+The fact that the material upon which the poet's mood has worked has not
+been confined to some event that has happened to himself but has included
+the condition of an imagined being does not alter the radical significance
+of his experience or influence the essential nature of its product. The
+poetic energy may operate on many things through a million moods, but the
+character of the energy is immutable. And when we speak of lyric, thinking
+of the direct and simple activity of this energy unmodified by the process
+of any other energies, we shall, if we get our mind clear about it, see
+that we mean pure poetry, and we shall recognise this poetry as being
+constant in its essential properties in whatever association we may
+henceforth find it.
+
+If it is allowed, as, for the reasons I have attempted to set out, I think
+it rightly may be, that the purely poetic energy is not a variable quality,
+that of any given expression of a man's mental activity it can definitely
+be said that it is or is not poetry, there remains one question to be
+answered,--Can one poem be better than another, if both are truly poems?
+Or can one poet, by reason of his poetry, be better than another poet by
+reason of his? Is Keats, for example, a better poet than Suckling? Every
+good judge of poetry, if that question were put, would be likely to answer
+without hesitation--Yes, he is. And yet the answer, although the reason for
+it may be found and, in a sense, allowed, does not in any way discredit the
+principle that has been defined. With a passage from each of these poets at
+his best before us, let us see what we find. This from Keats:
+
+    Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
+      No hungry generations tread thee down;
+    The voice I hear this passing night was heard
+      In ancient days by emperor and clown:
+
+    Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
+      Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home
+        She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
+          The same that oft-times hath
+        Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
+        Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
+
+And this from Suckling:
+
+    Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
+      Prythee, why so pale?
+    Will, when looking well can't move her,
+      Looking ill prevail?
+      Prythee, why so pale?
+
+    Why so dull and mute, young sinner?
+      Prythee, why so mute?
+    Will, when speaking well can't win her,
+      Saying nothing do't?
+      Prythee, why so mute?
+
+    Quit, quit, for shame! This will not move;
+      This cannot take her.
+    If of herself she will not love,
+      Nothing can make her:
+      The Devil take her!
+
+The poetic energy in Keats is here entirely undisturbed. I do not mean that
+it is not united to any other energy--though here it happens not to be--as
+in poetic drama, where it is united to the dramatic energy and is still
+undisturbed in its full activity, but that it is here freely allowed to
+work itself out to its consummation without any concession, conscious or
+unconscious, to any mood that is not non-poetic but definitely anti-poetic,
+in which case, although unchanged in its nature, it would be constrained in
+a hostile atmosphere. Keats's words are struck out of a mood that tolerates
+nothing but its own full life and is concerned only to satisfy that life by
+uncompromising expression. The result is pure poetry, or lyric. But when
+we come to Suckling's lines we find that there is a difference. The poetic
+energy is still here. Suckling has quite clearly experienced something in
+a mood of more than common intensity. It does not matter that the material
+which has been subjected to the mood is not in itself very profound or
+passionate. Another poet, Wither, with material curiously like Suckling's
+to work upon, achieves poetry as unquestionable if not so luxuriant as
+Keats's.
+
+    Shall I, wasting in despair,
+    Die because a woman's fair?
+    Or make pale my cheeks with care
+    Because another's rosy are?
+    Be she fairer than the day,
+    Or the flowery mead in May--
+      If she think not well of me
+      What care I how fair she be?
+
+To object that there is an emotional gaiety in this which is foreign to
+Keats is but to state a personal preference. It is, indeed, a preference
+which is common and founded upon very general experience. Most of us have,
+from the tradition and circumstance of our own lives, a particular sympathy
+with the grave and faintly melancholy beauty which is the most recurrent
+note in fine poetry throughout the world, but this does not establish this
+particular strain of beauty as being in any way essential to poetry. It is
+related to an almost universal condition, but it is a fertile source of
+poetry, not one with the poetic energy itself. It would be absurd to impugn
+a man's taste because he preferred Chaucer's poetry, which has scarcely
+a touch of this melancholy, to Shelley's, which is drenched in it, as it
+would be absurd to quarrel with it because he obtained strictly imaginative
+pleasure more readily from
+
+    Shall I, wasting in despair
+
+than from
+
+    Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
+
+His preference merely shows him to belong to a minority: it does not show
+him to be insensible to poetry. For Wither's mood, by the evidence of its
+expression, although it may not be so universal in its appeal nor so
+adventurous in design, is here active to the degree of poetry no less
+surely than is Keats's. And yet, while it would be an error of judgment
+to rate Wither below Keats (by virtue of these illustrations) in pure
+poetic energy, it would, I think, be quite sound so to rate Suckling by
+the witness of his lyric. For while Wither's mood, in its chosen activity,
+is wholly surrendered to the poetic energy, Suckling's is not. It is
+contaminated by one of those external activities which I have spoken of as
+being hostile to poetry. Although he perceives his subject with the right
+urgency, he is unwilling to be quite loyal to his perception. He makes
+some concession to the witty insincerity of the society in which he lives,
+and his poetry is soiled by the contact. It is not destroyed, not even
+changed in its nature, but its gold is left for ever twisted in a baser
+metal with which it does not suit. What we get is not a new compound with
+the element that corresponds to poetic energy transmuted, but an
+ill-sorted mixture, while Keats gives us the unblemished gold. We are
+right in proclaiming his the finer achievement.
+
+Keats and Wither will serve as examples with which to finish our argument.
+In spite of all that has been said Keats takes higher rank as poet than
+Wither? Yes, certainly, but not because the poetic energy in him was a
+finer thing than the poetic energy that was in Wither. It was more
+constant, which is a fact of no little importance; its temper appealed to
+a much more general sympathy, a circumstance which cannot be left out of
+the reckoning; it touched a far wider range of significant material.
+These things give Keats his just superiority of rank, but they do not
+deprive Wither, at his best moments, of the essential quality which is
+with Keats, as with all poets, the one by which he makes his proudest
+claim good. Nor need it be feared that in allowing Wither, with his rare
+moments of withdrawn and rather pale perfection, this the highest of all
+distinctions, we are making accession to the title of poet too easy. It
+remains the most difficult of all human attainments. The difference between
+the essential quality in those eight fragile lines and that in such verse
+as, say:
+
+    Oft. In the stilly night,
+      Ere slumber's chain has bound me,
+    Fond memory brings the light
+      Of other days around me,
+
+may be so elusive as to deceive many people that it does not exist, but it
+is the difference between the rarest of all energies and a common enough
+sensibility.
+
+
+
+LYRIC FORMS
+
+
+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 anapaests, 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:
+
+    I'll show thee the best springs; I'll pluck thee berries;
+    I'll fish for thee and get thee wood enough.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow;
+    And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts;
+    Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how
+    To snare the nimble marmoset; I'll bring thee
+    To clustering filberts and sometimes I'll get thee
+    Young scamels from the rock.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+SONG
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+THE POPULARITY OF LYRIC
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Lyric, by John Drinkwater
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