lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICALPOETRYMilton's Samson, suggest a subordination of metricaleffect to the claims of thought, an effort to secure arhythm that echoes and emphasises the thought ratherthan adorns it. The thoughts stand out clear, evenwith a certain austerity; they do not "lie like bees intheir own sweetness drown'd," as in The Lotos-EatersOr The Vision of Sin.There remain Arnold's two odes in regular stanzaicform, The Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis, poems whosemetrical form and felicitous sensuous touches confessthe poet's debt to Keats, but which in thought andfeeling are a repetition of the ever-recurring Arnoldianmelancholy and resignation, a poet's mood which, likeByron's, represented only one phase of his mind. Theletters and prose-works show that he like Byron hadquite other sides to his nature. Of the two TheScholar Gipsy is the happier and fresher in conceptionand as a whole the more perfect; but the flowerstanzas in Thyrsis, and some of the other verses, fallin no way behind. If there are more poignantlyrics, these are the richest in sensuous and musicalbeauty.Arnold's endeavour to bring poetry back to a greatersimplicity of form while weighting it with thought metwith very indirect support from the group of youngpoets who emerged between the publication of TheGerm in 1850 and 1870. Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne,Christina Rossetti—they all in different ways felt theinfluence of the thought that was disintegrating theearlier Victorian tradition. But they were artists, notthinkers—with degrees of individual exception—andtheir work was to be a further elaboration and enrichmentof the amazing virtuosity of English poetryin this century, especially lyrical poetry. In them a100