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?" theanswer due to you from each would be--"a river. " And yet this would hardlybe matter to satisfy your enquiring mind. You would more probably say, "What do you know of the Thames?" or, "Describe the Thames to me. " Thiswould bring you a great variety of opinions, many dissertations ongeological and national history, many words in praise of beauty, manypersonal confessions. Here would be the revelation of many mindsapproaching a great subject in as many manners, confirming andcontradicting each other, making on the whole some impression of cumulativejudgment, giving you many clues to what might be called the truth, no oneof them by itself coming near to anything like full knowledge, and thefinal word would inevitably be left unsaid. The question, "What is poetry?" has been answered innumerable times, oftenby the subtlest and clearest minds, and as many times has it been answereddifferently. The answer in itself now makes a large and distinguishedliterature to which, full as it is of keen intelligence and even ofconstructive vision, we can return with unstaling pleasure. The very poetsthemselves, it is true, lending their wits to the debate, have left theanswer 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 thiswisdom, prospering from Sidney's _Apology_ until to-day, does notstrictly attempt to answer the question that is put. It does not tell ussingly what poetry is, but it speculates upon the cause and effect ofpoetry. It enquires into the impulse that moves the poet to creation anddescribes, as far as individual limitations will allow, the way in whichthe poet's work impresses the world. When Wordsworth says "poetry is thebreath and finer spirit of all knowledge, " he is, exactly, in one intuitiveword, telling us how poetry comes into being, directing us with an inspiredgesture to its source, and not strictly telling us what it is; and soShelley 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, acertain use of words, and, remembering this simple fact, there has beenone perfect and final answer to the question, "What is poetry?" It wasColeridge'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 ofpoetry as such. The whole question of what causes a poet to say this orthat and of the impression that is thence made upon us can be definitelynarrowed down to the question "How does he say it?" The manner of hisutterance is, indeed, the sole evidence before us. To know anything ofa poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to knowsomething that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainlyinessential. The written word is everything. If it is an imperfect word, noexternal circumstance can heighten its value as poetry. We may at times, knowing of honourable and inspiriting things in a poet's life, read intohis imperfect word a value that it does not possess. When we do this ourjudgment of poetry is inert; we are not getting pleasure from his workbecause it is poetry, but for quite other reasons. It may be a quitewholesome pleasure, but it is not the high æsthetic pleasure which thepeople who experience it generally believe to be the richest and most vividof all pleasures because it is experienced by a mental state that is moreeager and masterful than any other. Nor is our judgment acute when wepraise a poet's work because it chimes with unexpected precision to someparticular belief or experience of our own or because it directs us bysuggestion to something dear to our personal affections. Again the poet isgiving us delight, but not the delight of poetry. We have to consider thisalone--the poet has something to say: does he say it in the best words inthe 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 thebest order is, perhaps, the rarest to which man can reach, implying as itdoes a coincidence of unfettered imaginative ecstasy with superb mentalpoise. 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 asto quicken his brain to this flawless ordering of the best words, and itis that ordering and that alone which communicates to us the ecstasy, andgives us the supreme delight of poetry. It should here be added that poetryhabitually takes the form of verse. It is, perhaps, profitless to attemptany analysis of the emotional law that directs this choice, nor need itarbitrarily be said that poetry must of necessity be verse. But it is afact, sufficiently founded on experience, that the intensity of vision thatdemands and achieves nothing less than the best words in the best order forits expression does instinctively select the definitely patterned rhythmof verse as being the most apt for its purpose. We find, then, that thecondition of poetry as defined by Coleridge implies exactly what thetrained judgment holds poetry to be. It implies the highest attainableintensity of vision, which, by the sanction of almost universal example, casts its best ordering of the best words into the form of verse. Ruskinwrote, with fine spiritual ardour-- ". . . Women of England! . . . Do not think your daughters can be trained to thetruth of their own human beauty, while the pleasant places, which Godmade at once for their schoolroom and their playground, lie desolate anddefiled. You cannot baptize them rightly in those inch-deep founts ofyours, unless you baptize them also in the sweet waters which the greatLawgiver strikes forth for ever from the rocks of your native land--waterswhich a Pagan would have worshipped in their purity, and you worship onlywith pollution. You cannot lead your children faithfully to those narrowaxe-hewn church altars of yours, while the dark azure altars in heaven--themountains that sustain your island throne--mountains on which a Pagan wouldhave seen the powers of heaven rest in every wreathed cloud--remain for youwithout inscription; altars built, not to, but by an unknown God. " Here we have, we may say, words in their best order--Coleridge's equallyadmirable definition of prose. It is splendid prose, won only from greatnobility of emotion. But it is not poetry, not the best words in the bestorder announcing that the feeling expressed has been experienced with thehighest intensity possible to the mind of man. The tenderness for earth andits people and the heroic determination not to watch their defilement insilence, have been deeply significant things to Ruskin, moving him toexcellent words. But could they be more strictly experienced, yet moredeeply significant, shaping yet more excellent words? Blake gives us theanswer: 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 perfectlychosen, that as a direct social charge they achieve their purpose betterthan any others that could have been shaped. Even if we allow this anddo not press, as we very reasonably might, the reply that merely in thisdirection Blake's poem working, as is the manner of all great art, withtremendous but secret vigour upon the imagination of the people, has adeeper and more permanent effect than Ruskin's prose, we still rememberthat the sole purpose of poetry is to produce the virile spiritualactivity that we call æsthetic delight and that to do this is the highestachievement to which the faculties of man can attain. If by "the bestwords" we mean anything, we must mean the best words for the highestpossible purpose. To take an analogy: if we say that a democraticgovernment is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completelyfulfills the highest function of a government--the realisation of the willof the people. But it is also a function of government to organise thepeople and--although, just as we may think that Blake's poem finallybeats Ruskin's prose on Ruskin's own ground, we may think, too, that thegovernment that best represents the people will finally best organisethe people--it may quite plausibly be said that in this business anaristocratic or militant government will, in an imperfectly conditionedcivilisation (such as that of the world to-day), excel a democraticgovernment. Nevertheless, we still say with an easy mind that a democraticgovernment is the best government, without qualification, since it excelsin the highest purpose of government. Clearly Coleridge implies, andreasonably enough, an elaboration such as this in his definition--the bestwords in the best order. To say that Blake and Ruskin, in those passages, were giving expression to dissimilar experiences is but to emphasise thedistinction between prose and poetry. The closest analysis discovers nodifference between the essential thought of the one and the other. ButBlake projected the thought through a mood of higher intensity, and, whereRuskin perfectly ordered admirable words, he perfectly ordered thebest words. It is the controlling mood that differs, not the materialcontrolled. Hence it is that still another mind, starting from the sameradical perception, might transfigure it through a mood as urgent asBlake's and produce yet another poem of which it could strictly be saidthat here again were the best words in the best order. We should thenhave three men moved by the same thought; in the one case the imaginativeshaping of the thought would fail to reach the point at which the recordand communication of ecstasy become the chief intention, and the expressionwould be prose; in each of the other cases the shaping would pass beyondthat point, and there would be two separate moods expressed, each in theterms of poetry. One further qualification remains to be made. By words we must mean, asColeridge must have meant, words used for a purpose which they alone canserve. Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiencesthat can be communicated in no other way. If you ask me the time, and Isay--it is six o'clock, it may be said that I am using the best words inthe best order, and that, although the thought in my mind is incapable ofbeing refined into the higher æsthetic experience of which we have spoken, my answer is, if Coleridge was right, poetry. But these are not, in ourpresent sense, words at all. They have no power which is peculiar tothemselves. If I show you my watch you are answered just as effectively. That there is no absolute standard for reference does not matter. Allæsthetic appreciation and opinion can but depend upon our judgment, fortified by knowledge of what is, by cumulative consent, the best that hasbeen done. There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the bestwords in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge andjudgment, that it is so. And the conviction is, exactly, the convictionthat the mood to which the matter has been subjected has been of such akind as to achieve an intensity beyond which we cannot conceive the mind aspassing, and it follows that there may be--as indeed there are--many poemsdealing with the same subject each of which fulfills the obligations ofpoetry as defined by Coleridge. For while the subjects of poetry are fewand recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It isthe same in all arts. If six masters paint the same landscape and underthe same conditions, there will be one subject but six visions, andconsequently six different interpretations, each one of which may, giventhe mastery, satisfy us as being perfect; perfect, that is, not as theexpression of a subject which has no independent artistic existence, but asthe expression of the mood in which the subject is realised. So it is inpoetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as havingbeen of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to dothis the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificantverse. THE DEGREES OF POETRY The question that necessarily follows these reflections is--Are theredegrees in poetry? Since a short lyric may completely satisfy therequirements of poetry as here set down, announcing itself to have beencreated in a poetic or supremely intensified mood, can poetry be said atany time to go beyond this? If we accept these conclusions, can a thing soslight, 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 anyessentially poetic way below it? The logical answer is, no; and I think itis the right one. In considering it we should come to an understanding ofthe nature of lyric, the purpose of this essay. But first let us see howfar it may be justifiable. PARADISE LOST It is commonly asserted and accepted that _Paradise Lost_ is among thetwo or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type ofsupreme poetic achievement in our literature. What are the qualities byvirtue 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 havespoken. 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 fordelighted admiration. But to be constant in a virtue is not to enhanceits quality. Superbly furnished as _Paradise Lost_ is with thisimaginative beauty, the beauty is as rich and unquestionable in the fewpages of _Lycidas_; there is less of it, that is all. And who shallsay that it is less ecstatic or less perfect in the little orison to SaintBen? 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, inwhatever 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 goodfortune. And yet we know that _Paradise Lost_ is a greater work thanthis little flight of certain song, greater, too, than the poet's ownelegy. There is an explanation. Of all the energies of man, that which I will anticipate my argument bycalling the poetic energy, the energy that created Herrick's song and thedistinguishing qualities of that passage from Milton, is the rarest and themost highly, if not the most generally, honoured; we have only to think ofthe handful of men who at any time out of all the millions can bring thisperfect expression to a mood of the highest imaginative intensity, to knowthat the honour is justly bestowed. So splendid a thing is success inthis matter that failure, if it is matched with a will for sincerity andintelligence of purpose, will often bring a man some durable fame. But theenergies of man are manifold, and while we rightly set the poetic energyabove the rest, there are others which are only less rare, and in theirmost notable manifestations yielding to it alone in worthiness of homagewhich will, indeed, often be more generally paid. Such an energy is theprofound intellectual control of material, as distinct from profoundemotional sensitiveness to material; the capacity for ordering great massesof detail into a whole of finely balanced and duly related proportions. Cæsar and Napoleon had it, marshalling great armies to perfectly conceiveddesigns; Fielding had it, using it to draw a multitude of character andevent into the superbly shaped lines of his story; the greatest politicalleaders have had it; Cromwell had it, organising an enthusiasm; Elizabeth, organising a national adventure. [1] Again, there is the energyof morality, ardently desiring justice and right fellowship, sublimelylived by men who have made goodness great, like Lincoln, sublimely spokenby men who made sermons passionate, like Ruskin and Carlyle. To take oneother instance, there is the highly specialised energy that delights in theobjective perception of differentiations of character, the chief energy ofthe deftest wits such as Samuel Johnson and the best comic dramatists. [1: It may be necessary to point out that while the poetic energydoes not include this architectural power, the intellectual co-ordinationof large masses of material, it does, of course, include the shapelycontrol of the emotion which is its being. It is, indeed, difficult to seeprecisely what can be meant by the suggestion that is often made that theemotions can ever be translated into poetic form wholly without the play ofintellect. If the emotion is intense enough for the creation of poetry atall, it will inevitably call up the intellectual power necessary to itsshaping, otherwise it would be ineffectually diffused. Mr. John Bailey, inhis masterly if sometimes provoking essay on Milton says, in the midstof some admirable remarks on this subject, "It has been said by a livingwriter that 'when reason is subsidiary to emotion verse is the right meansof expression, and, when emotion to reason, prose. ' This is roughly true, though the poetry of mere emotion is poor stuff. " I would suggest thatpoetry of emotion, in this sense, does not and could not exist. Bad verseis merely the evidence of both emotion and intellect that are, so tospeak, below poetic power, not of emotion divorced from intellect, whichevaporates unrecorded. ] Any one of these energies, greatly manifested, will compel a justadmiration; not so great an admiration as the poetic energy, which iswitness of the highest urgency of individual life, of all things the mostadmirable, but still great. If, further, we consider any one of theseenergies by itself, we shall see that if it were co-existent with thepoetic energy, the result would be likely to be that, in contact withso masterful a force, it would become yet more emphatic, and so a thingarresting in itself would become yet more notable under its new dominion. And so it is. Fielding's architectural power is a yet more wonderful thingin Sophocles, where it is allied to poetic energy; Ruskin's moral fervouris, for all its nobility, less memorable than Wordsworth's and Ben Jonsondefines character more pungently than Sheridan. These energies remain, nevertheless, distinct from the poetic energy. When, however, a poet isendowed not alone with his own particular gift of poetry, but also withsome of these other energies--of which there are many--his work veryrightly is allowed an added greatness. It is so with _Paradise Lost_. Of the three energies other than the poetic that I have mentioned, Miltonhad rich measure of two and something of the third. No man has everexcelled him either in power of intellectual control or in moral passion, and he was not without some sense of character. Consequently we get inhis great poem, not only the dominating poetic quality which is the chiefthing, enabling the poet to realise his vision (or mood) perfectly, butalso the spectacle of a great number of perfectly realised visions beingrelated to each other with excellent harmony; we get, further, a greatmoral exaltation--again perfectly realised by the poetic energy, and weget, finally, considerable subtlety--far more than is generally allowed--ofpsychological detail. From all these things, the architectonics, the zealfor justice and the revelation of character, we get an added and wholesomedelight which gives Milton's work a place of definitely greater eminencethan Herrick's song in the record of human activity. In effect, Miltonbesides being a poet, which is the greatest of all distinctions, becomes, by possession of those other qualities, a great man as well, and I thinkthat this is really what we mean when we speak of a great poet. Without hispoetic 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 apersonality yet so true a poet as John Clare[2], Milton would still be agreat man, while Herrick without his poetry would be indistinguishable fromthe crowd. And the great man is as clearly evident in Milton's poetry as heis clearly not evident in Herrick's. [2: It may be asked: "Do you really think that a poet who has leftno 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 mesay, once for all, that I do think so. To have written one perfect songis to have given witness and the only kind of witness (in common with themedia of other arts) that is finally authoritative, that at least onesupremely exacting mood has been perfectly realised; that is to say, onemoment of life has been perfectly experienced. And since, with our humanconception, we can see no good or desirable end beyond the perfectexperience of life, the man who proves to us that he has done this, nomatter 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, withwhatever earnestness and nobility, has but proved to us that he desiredthis perfection of experience, even though the desire is exalted by themost heroic altruism. ] WHAT IS LYRIC? And so we have Milton and Herrick, both poets, the one a great man, theother 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 rarestof all events. Milton is one of perhaps a dozen names in the history of theworld's literature, Herrick--still with a fine enough distinction--one ofsomething under two hundred in the history of our own. And yet they areleft on equal terms in the possession of the purely poetic energy. Milton'sachievement outweighs Herrick's, but for the reasons that I have mentioned, and not because poetry grows better by accumulation or because it ispossible to prove, or even to satisfy any considerable majority of goodjudges, 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 thatdistinguishes what we recognise as poetry from all other verbal expression. Returning for a moment to _Paradise Lost_, we find that here is a workof art of which the visible and external sign is words. That it has threequalities--there may be more, but it is not to the point--architecturalpower, moral exaltation and a sense of character, each of which, althoughit may be more impressive when presented as it were under the auspices ofthe 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 tointellectual fusion of much diverse material, as is the first of thoseother qualities, or to the kind of material, as are the other two, but toextreme activity of the perceptive mood upon whatever object it may bedirected, remembering that this activity is highly exacting as to theworthiness 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 otherrespects as those songs of Herrick's. And in each case we find that thetoken of this quality is a conviction that here are words that could nothave been otherwise chosen or otherwise placed; that here is an expressionto rearrange which would be to destroy it--a conviction that we by no meanshave about the prose of Fielding and Ruskin, admirable as it is. We find, in short, that this quality equals a maximum of imaginative pressurefreeing itself in the best words in the best order. And this quality is thespecific poetic quality; the presence or absence of which should decide forus, without any other consideration whatever, whether what is before us isor is not poetry. And it seems to me, further, that what we have in ourminds when we speak of lyric is precisely this same quality; that lyric andthe expression of pure poetic energy unrelated to other energies are thesame thing. THE CLASSIFICATION OF POETRY It is not yet the place to discuss the question of lyric forms--to considerwhat 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 anexpression of personal emotion, with its implication that there is anessential difference between a lyric and, say, dramatic or narrativepoetry. A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, butthen so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds ofpoetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by whollyartificial divisions which have no real being. To talk of dramaticpoetry, epic poetry and narrative poetry is to talk of three differentthings--epic, drama and narrative; but each is combined with a fourth thingin common, which is poetry, which, in turn, is in itself of precisely thesame nature as the lyric of which we are told that it is yet a furtherkind of poetry. Let us here take a passage from a play and consider it inrelation 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 Cæsar, 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 becauseit is peculiarly to our present purpose. In the first place, Shakespeare, by using both prose and verse--which he by no means always does undersimilar circumstances--makes a clear formal division between what is poetryand what is not. It is all magnificently contrived drama, but down to theClown's exit it is not poetry. The significance of the Clown does notdemand of Shakespeare's imaginative mood that highest activity that wouldforce him to poetry. The short dialogue has great excellence, but not thiskind of excellence. The fact that it occurs in what we call a poetic dramadoes not make it poetry; its fine dramatic significance does not give itpoetic significance. We are living in a world of dramatic poetry, andyet we have here a perfectly clear distinction between the drama and thepoetry, since we definitely have the one without the other. Then, whenCleopatra begins her farewell speech, we have the addition of poetry anda continuance of the drama. And this speech illustrates perfectly thesuggestion that the quality which is commonly said to be exclusively lyricis the quality of all poetry. It illustrates it in a particularlyemphatic way. For not only is it unquestionably poetry, but it is alsounquestionably dramatic. Very clearly the poet is not here speaking out ofhis own actual experience; it is a woman speaking, one who is a queen: whois wrecked upon the love of kings: who knows that she is about to die astrange and sudden death. So that if the impulse of the poetry in poeticdrama were essentially different from the impulse of lyric, if the personalexperience which is said to be this latter were something differing in kindfrom the experience which is the source of what is called dramatic poetry, then here is a case where the essential difference could surely beperceived and defined. It cannot be defined, for it does not exist. It is afallacy to suppose that experience is any the less personal because it isconcerned with an event happening to someone else. If my friend falls to amortal sickness my experience, if my imaginative faculty is acute, is aspoignant as his; if he achieves some great good fortune, my delight is asvigorous as his. And if I am a poet, and choose to express the grief orpleasure as if it were his concern and not mine, the experience does notbecome one whit less personal to me. You may, if it is convenient, call theresult lyric if I speak as though the experience is my own and dramaticpoetry if I speak of it as being his, but what you are really saying isthat in the one case I am producing pure poetry, and in the other I amproducing poetry in conjunction with dramatic statement. The poetic qualityis 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 isclearly, 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 notbeen confined to some event that has happened to himself but has includedthe condition of an imagined being does not alter the radical significanceof his experience or influence the essential nature of its product. Thepoetic energy may operate on many things through a million moods, but thecharacter of the energy is immutable. And when we speak of lyric, thinkingof the direct and simple activity of this energy unmodified by the processof any other energies, we shall, if we get our mind clear about it, seethat we mean pure poetry, and we shall recognise this poetry as beingconstant in its essential properties in whatever association we mayhenceforth find it. If it is allowed, as, for the reasons I have attempted to set out, I thinkit 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 definitelybe said that it is or is not poetry, there remains one question to beanswered, --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 byreason of his? Is Keats, for example, a better poet than Suckling? Everygood judge of poetry, if that question were put, would be likely to answerwithout hesitation--Yes, he is. And yet the answer, although the reason forit may be found and, in a sense, allowed, does not in any way discredit theprinciple that has been defined. With a passage from each of these poets athis 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 thatit is not united to any other energy--though here it happens not to be--asin poetic drama, where it is united to the dramatic energy and is stillundisturbed in its full activity, but that it is here freely allowed towork itself out to its consummation without any concession, conscious orunconscious, to any mood that is not non-poetic but definitely anti-poetic, in which case, although unchanged in its nature, it would be constrained ina hostile atmosphere. Keats's words are struck out of a mood that toleratesnothing but its own full life and is concerned only to satisfy that life byuncompromising expression. The result is pure poetry, or lyric. But whenwe come to Suckling's lines we find that there is a difference. The poeticenergy is still here. Suckling has quite clearly experienced something ina mood of more than common intensity. It does not matter that the materialwhich has been subjected to the mood is not in itself very profound orpassionate. Another poet, Wither, with material curiously like Suckling'sto work upon, achieves poetry as unquestionable if not so luxuriant asKeats'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 toKeats is but to state a personal preference. It is, indeed, a preferencewhich is common and founded upon very general experience. Most of us have, from the tradition and circumstance of our own lives, a particular sympathywith the grave and faintly melancholy beauty which is the most recurrentnote in fine poetry throughout the world, but this does not establish thisparticular strain of beauty as being in any way essential to poetry. It isrelated to an almost universal condition, but it is a fertile source ofpoetry, not one with the poetic energy itself. It would be absurd to impugna man's taste because he preferred Chaucer's poetry, which has scarcelya touch of this melancholy, to Shelley's, which is drenched in it, as itwould be absurd to quarrel with it because he obtained strictly imaginativepleasure 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 showhim to be insensible to poetry. For Wither's mood, by the evidence of itsexpression, although it may not be so universal in its appeal nor soadventurous in design, is here active to the degree of poetry no lesssurely than is Keats's. And yet, while it would be an error of judgmentto rate Wither below Keats (by virtue of these illustrations) in purepoetic energy, it would, I think, be quite sound so to rate Suckling bythe 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 iscontaminated by one of those external activities which I have spoken of asbeing hostile to poetry. Although he perceives his subject with the righturgency, he is unwilling to be quite loyal to his perception. He makessome 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 evenchanged in its nature, but its gold is left for ever twisted in a basermetal with which it does not suit. What we get is not a new compound withthe element that corresponds to poetic energy transmuted, but anill-sorted mixture, while Keats gives us the unblemished gold. We areright 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 thanWither? Yes, certainly, but not because the poetic energy in him was afiner thing than the poetic energy that was in Wither. It was moreconstant, which is a fact of no little importance; its temper appealed toa much more general sympathy, a circumstance which cannot be left out ofthe reckoning; it touched a far wider range of significant material. These things give Keats his just superiority of rank, but they do notdeprive Wither, at his best moments, of the essential quality which iswith Keats, as with all poets, the one by which he makes his proudestclaim good. Nor need it be feared that in allowing Wither, with his raremoments of withdrawn and rather pale perfection, this the highest of alldistinctions, we are making accession to the title of poet too easy. Itremains the most difficult of all human attainments. The difference betweenthe essential quality in those eight fragile lines and that in such verseas, 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 itis the difference between the rarest of all energies and a common enoughsensibility. LYRIC FORMS While, therefore, the term "lyric poetry" would in itself seem to betautological, and so to speak of lyric forms is, strictly, to speak ofall poetic forms, there are nevertheless certain more or less definedcharacteristics of form that we usually connect in our mind with what wecall "a lyric" (or, even less exactly, "lyric poetry") which may be said tobe a poem where the pure poetic energy is not notably associated with otherenergies--with a partial exception to which reference will be made. Inexamining these characteristics nothing will be attempted in the way of ahistory or an inclusive consideration of particular forms which are knownas lyric, but only, as far as may be, an analysis of their governingprinciples. 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 sustainedfor a short time. Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of shortones is perfectly just. What happens, I think, is this. The poetic mood, selecting a subject, records its perception of that subject, the result isa lyric, and the mood passes. On its recurrence another subject is selectedand the process repeated. But if another energy than the purely poetic, theenergy of co-ordination of which I have spoken, comes into operation, therewill be a desire in the poet to link the records of his recurrent poeticperceptions together, and so to construct many poems into a connectedwhole. Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama ornarrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governedinto a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them. Thedecision that the material used at one occurrence of the poetic mood shallbe related to the material used at the next is not in itself an operationof the purely poetic energy, but of another. The present purpose is, however, to consider the general character of formsused by poets when they choose to leave each successive record of poeticexperience in isolation. I have said that any translation of emotion intopoetry--it might be said, into any intelligible expression--necessarilyimplies a certain co-operation of intellectual control. If we take even adetached 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 emotionalact. But intellectual control of this kind is not identical with thatintellectual relating of one part to another of which we have beenspeaking, which we may call co-ordination. Of all energies, however, theco-ordinating energy is the one with which the poetic energy is mostinstinctively in sympathy, and it is in this connection that I made apartial exception when I said that a lyric was a poem where the pure poeticenergy was not notably associated with other energies. When a poet writesa poem of corresponding lines and stanzas or in a form of which thestructural outline is decided by a definable law--as in the sonnet--he isin effect obeying the impulse of the co-ordinating energy, and the use ofrhyme is another sign of obedience to the same impulse. It so happensthat this energy, next to the poetic energy, is the most impressiveand satisfying of all mental activities, and while poetry may existindependently of it, the fact remains that it very rarely does so. A verycurious fallacy about this matter has sometimes obtained support. Theadherents of what is called free verse, not content, as they shouldthankfully be, if they can achieve poetry in their chosen medium, aresometimes tempted to claim that it is the peculiar virtue of theirmanner--which, let me say it again, may be entirely admirable--that itenables the structure of verse to keep in constant correspondence withchange of emotion. The notion is, of course, a very convenient one when youwish to escape the very exacting conditions of formal control, and have notthe patience or capacity to understand their difficulties, and that it isprofessed by many who do so wish is doubtless. But there are other seriousand 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 afallacy, and doubly so. In the first place, the change of line-lengths andrhythms 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 thesense, though that is by the way. It is not as though given rhythms andline-lengths had any peculiar emotional significance attached to them. A dirge may be in racing anapæsts, laughter in the most sedate iambicmeasure; a solemn invocation may move in rapid three-foot lines, whilegrave heroic verse may contain the gayest of humours. In a long work, indeed, variety of structure may be used to give variety of sensation tothe ear with delightful and sometimes even necessary effect, though--inEnglish, and I am always speaking of English--it cannot even then be usedwith any certainty to express change of emotion. But in a lyric the eardoes not demand this kind of relief. With many of us, at least, it acceptsand even demands an unbroken external symmetry. The symmetry may beexternally 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 betweenone part of the structure and another, and this relation is a positive helpto us in understanding the plain sense of the words, while its presencedoes not involve any loss of emotional significance which its absence wouldsupply. The truth is--and here is the second and chief objection to theclaim that we are discussing--that the poetic mood, which is what isexpressed by the rhythm and form of verse and may very well be called theemotion of poetry, is not at all the same thing as what are commonly calledthe emotions--as happiness, despair, love, hate and the rest. Its colourwill vary between one poet and another, but in one poet it will berelatively fixed in quality, while these other emotions are but materialupon which, in common with many other things, it may work. And being arelatively fixed condition, it is, for its part, in no need of changingmetrical devices for its expression, and to maintain that the "emotions, "subjects of its activity, should have in their alternation a correspondingalternation of metrical device is no more reasonable than to maintain thatother subjects of its activity should be so treated; it is to forget, forexample, 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 poeticemotion governing it, and to say that he ought to have made the metricaland 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 fifthand sixth the death of golden lads and girls and of chimney-sweepersrespectively, all things manifestly very different from each other, andthings which, if it were the function of verbal rhythms and metres to dothis sort of thing at all, could not with any propriety have the closelyrelated equivalents that they have here. No; to ask for this kind of effectis really to ask for nothing more valuable than the devotional crosses andaltars into which a perverted wit led some of the seventeenth-century poetsto contrive their verses in unhappy moments, or Southey's _Lodore_, inwhich there is a fond pretence that verbal rhythms are water. [3] It is justas difficult to explain why verbal rhythms will not perform this functionas 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 inessentialpoetic device. One might sometimes suppose from what we are told, thatVirgil's chief claim to poetry was the fact that he once made a line ofverse resemble the movement of a horse's hoofs. ] But while it is true that the function of the rhythm of poetry is toexpress the governing poetic emotion, and that, since the emotion initself is fixed rather than changing, it will best do this not by mereirregularity, but by flexible movement that is contained in an externalsymmetry, it does not follow at all that the subject-matter which thepoetic emotion is controlling, be it the "emotions" or anything else, cannot hope for expression that catches its peculiar properties. To do thisin poetry is the supreme distinction not of rhythms, but of words. Thepreponderance 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 rankas 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 technicaldeficiency. Even if Milton had not written the choruses of _SamsonAgonistes_ and Shakespeare his songs, nobody would be so absurd asto suggest that they adopted this five-foot line and spent their mightyartistry in sending supple and flowing variety through its externaluniformity, because they could not manage any other. They used it becausethey found that its rhythm perfectly expressed their poetic emotion, andbecause the formal relation of one line to another satisfied the instinctfor co-ordination, and for the full expression of the significance of theirsubject-matter they relied not upon their rhythms, but upon their choiceof words. The belief that when a poem is written there is one and only onemetrical scheme that could possibly be used for that particular occasion isan amiable delusion that should be laid aside with such notions as that thepoet makes his breakfast on dew and manna. Once the poem is written wemay feel indeed, if it be a good one, that any change in the form isimpossible, but when the poet was about to write it we may be sure thathe quite deliberately weighed one form against another before making hischoice. It may even be true that he will sometimes find the shape of hispoem running to his tongue as it were unbidden, but this certainty ofselection is really in itself the result of long and, perhaps, subconsciousdeliberation. The point is that the chosen form must in any case expressthe poetic emotion, but that its particular election is a personal whim, wholly satisfactory in its result, rather than a divine necessity. _TheOde to the West Wind_ and the _Stanzas written in Dejection_ areboth superb poems, but who shall say that Shelley might not have writtenthe former in the short-measured nine-line stanzas and the latter in his_terza-rima_, and yet have embodied his poetic emotion as completelyas 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 caneasily be used. So plain a measure as the six-line octo-syllabic stanza maybe 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 expressionin words. When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he isendowing the word with life. He has something in his mind, subjected tohis poetic vision, and his problem is to find words that will compel us torealise the significance of that something. To solve this problem is hislast and most exacting difficulty, demanding a continual wariness and theclosest 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 beenwholly blameless of this relaxation or escaped its penalties, but it is byhis vigilance in this matter that we measure his virility. I suppose everyone knows the feeling that sometimes calls us to a lifewhere we fend and cater for ourselves in the fields and rivers, such asWilliam Morris knew when he shot fieldfares with his bow and arrow andcooked them for his supper. Shakespeare knew it too, in the mind ofCaliban, and his business was to realise this subject-matter for us in sucha way that it could not possibly escape us in vague generalisation. Itsappeal to our perceptions must be irresistible. He can do it only by theperfect 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 thefunction of words in poetry. The peculiar delight which we get from such apassage as this comes, I think, apart from its fundamental poetic quality, from the fact that the subject-matter is of such general interest asconstantly to tempt incomplete perception to inadequate expression. Consequently when we get an expression which is complete our pleasure hasan 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 oneof the emotions of which we have spoken; the emotion that marks the pity ofparting at death: I am dying, Egypt, dying: the use of that one word, Egypt, should answer for ever the people whothink that the subject-matter of poetry is to be expressed by rhythm. Thus we have rhythm expressing the poetic emotion, or intensity ofperception, and words expressing the thing that is intensely perceived; so, as the creed of the mystics shows us beauty born of the exact fusion ofthought with feeling, of perfect correspondence of the strictly chosenwords to the rhythmic movement is born the complete form of poetry. And when this perfect correspondence occurs unaccompanied by any otherenergy--save, perhaps, the co-ordinating energy of which I have spoken--wehave 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'sfor example, are taken from "dramatic poetry" and not from "lyric poetry, "my answer is that it is impossible to discover any essential differencebetween those lines and any authentic poem that is known as "a lyric. " Thekind of difference that there is can be found also between any twolyrics; it is accidental, resulting from difference of personality andsubject-matter, and the essential poetic intensity, which is the thing thatconcerns us, is of the same nature in both cases. Any general term that canfitly be applied to, say, the _Ode to The West Wind_ can be appliedwith equal fitness to Caliban's island lore. Both are poetry, springingfrom the same imaginative activity, living through the same perfectselection and ordering of words, and, in our response, quickening the sameecstasy. Although we are accustomed to look rather for the rhymed andstanzaic movement of the former in a lyric than for the stricter economyand uniformity of Caliban's blank verse, yet both have the essentialqualities 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 wedismiss the association of the art of poetry with the art of music, aswe may well do, I think the protest is left without any significance. InEnglish, at any rate, there is hardly any verse--a few Elizabethan poemsonly--written expressly to be sung and not to be spoken, that has anyimportance as poetry, and even the exceptions have their poetic value quiteindependently of their musical setting. For the rest, whenever a true poemis given a musical setting, the strictly poetic quality is destroyed. Themusician--if he be a good one--finds his own perception prompted by thepoet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception fromthe terms of poetry into the terms of music. The result may be, and oftenis, of rare beauty and of an artistic significance as great, perhaps, asthat of the poem itself, and the poet is mistaken in refusing, as he oftendoes, [4] to be the cause of the liberation of this new and admirableactivity in others. But, in the hands of the musician, once a poem hasserved this purpose, it has, as poetry, no further existence. It iswell that the musician should use fine poetry and not bad verse as hisinspiration, for obvious reasons, but when the poetry has so quickened himit is of no further importance in his art save as a means of exercising abeautiful instrument, the human voice. It is unnecessary to discuss therelative 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 aShelley is willing to lend his suggestions to the musician, he has someright to demand that the musician shall be a Wolf. The condition of hisallowing his poem to be used and destroyed in the process is, rightly, thatsomething of equal nobility shall be wrought of its dust. ] As far as my indifferent understanding of the musician's art will allow meI delight in and reverence it, and the singing human voice seems to me tobe, 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 withthe use of words in poetry. If the song be good, I do not care whether thewords are German, which I cannot understand, or English, which I can. Onthe whole I think I prefer not to understand them, since I am then notdistracted by thoughts of another art. If then from the argument about the lyric that it should "sing, " we dismissthis particular meaning of its adaptability to music, what have we left? Itcannot be that it peculiarly should be rhythmic, since we have seen that tobe 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 thatit peculiarly should be of passionate intensity, since again, this we haveseen to be the condition of all poetry. In short, it can mean nothing thatcannot with equal justice be said of poetry wherever it may be found. Tothe ear that is worthy of poetry the majestic verse of the great passagesin _Paradise Lost_, the fierce passion of Antony and Macbeth, themovement of the poetry in _Sigurd the Volsung_, "sing" as surely asthe lyrics of the Elizabethans or of _Poems and Ballads_. Poetry mustgive of its essential qualities at all times, and we cannot justly demandthat 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 desirebe unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, theuniversality of its appeal is a matter of course. We often hear people say, sincerely enough, that they feel no response to poetry. This nearly alwaysmeans that their natural feeling for poetry has been vitiated in someway, generally by contact, often forced upon them, with work that onlymasquerades as poetry, or by such misgovernment of their lives as dulls alltheir finer instincts. Unless it be wholly numbed in some such way, thedelight of poetry is ready to quicken in almost every man; and with alittle use it will quicken only to what is worthy. And lyric being purepoetry, and most commonly found in isolation in the short poems which arecalled lyrics, these will make the widest appeal of all the forms in whichpoetry is found. For while sympathy with the poetic energy is almostuniversal, 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 fullappreciation not only, in common with _The Reaper_, a sympathy withthe poetic energy, which it would obtain readily enough, but also asympathy with that other energy of intellectual control which has beendiscussed. This energy being, though profoundly significant, yet far lessso than the poetic energy, the response to it is far less general, and manyreaders of _Paradise Lost_ will find in it not only poetry, which theydesire but faintly, while in _The Reaper_ they will find poetry asnearly isolated from all other energies as it can be. CONCLUSION To summarise our argument, we find that poetry is the result of theintensest emotional activity attainable by man focusing itself upon somemanifestation of life, and experiencing that manifestation completely; thatthe emotion of poetry expresses itself in rhythm and that the significanceof the subject-matter is realised by the intellectual choice of the perfectword. We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of theseconditions, the best words in the best order--poetry; and to put thisessential poetry into different classes is impossible. But since it is mostcommonly found by itself in short poems which we call lyric, we may saythat the characteristic of the lyric is that it is the product of the purepoetic energy unassociated with other energies, and that lyric and poetryare synonymous terms.