lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

INTRODUCTORYmusic and colout and feeling the sole substance oftheir song. The prophetic mantle of the greaterromantic poets—Blake, Wordsworth, Keats—fell noton the poets but on the greater prose-writers of thereign of Queen Victoria—Carlyle, Ruskin, Darwin,Huxley, Arnold, Spencer, Newman,Now poetry of such a kind, in which feeling predominates,and the shaping ideas are inspiring butvague, will almost necessarily be lyrical or rhapsodicalin character; and of this lyrical, subjective, rhapsodicalcharacter are all the long poems of the century whichcount—The Prelude, Childe Harold, Alastor, Adonais,In Memoriam, Christmas Eve and Easter Day. Onlyepic poetry could have given adequate expression,to the Greek sense of the heroic, the adventurous,the tragic in human life. Only great tragedy was anadequate medium to present the wrestlings of Æschyluswith the problem of providence and justice. It isin the form, indeed, of lyrical rhapsody that theJewish prophets utter the deep wrestling of theirsouls with the revelation of Divine justice and condemnationof evil, but lyric of a kind far removedfrom song in the ordinary sense of the word. Theclosest parallel is some of the greater choral odes ofGreek tragedy and perhaps some fragments of Blake'sSongs of Innocence or the Prophetic Books, some passagesof Wordsworth's Prelude or such an outburst in theIntimations of Immortality as the stanza—Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting :The Soul that riseth with us, our life's Star,Hath had elsewhere its setting,And cometh from afar,and both Blake and Wordsworth might not havewritten quite in this manner but for the example and9