lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICALPOETRYwhen its theme is passion. On all other themes, evenliberty, even the sea, even other poets, even children,there is always a suggestion in the exalted, too-longsustainedchants, of frothiness,Double, doubletoil and trouble.For doubtless there was a certain amount of illusionin the spell Swinburne cast over us. He was not agreat love-poet as Donne was, and Shakespeare, andeven William Morris. Of love he knows only onemood. Of that no more than of any other theme doeshe write as one who has seenThe very pulse of the machineand so is able to open our eyes to unrealised values.It was the mode, not the mood, which bewitchedus. That was evident from the first in some poems—the spring chorus in Atalanta, so delightful in itsmovement yet as a real interpretation of the seasonnot comparable for a moment with Keats's Autumn;Itylus with its miraculous suggestion of the piercingsong of the nightingale and the quick swish of thedarting swallow's wings; and many another where themeaning, the feeling, count for next to nothing. Thefinal significance of Swinburne's poetry is that in it theamazing virtuosity of the lyrical poetry of the centuryattained a limit. He could reproduce and give newmusical values to any mode he chose—the Italiancanzone or sestina, mediaeval miracle, border ballad,French rondels, Greek drama and ode and choralsong, Elizabethan verse dramatic and lyrical — he116