lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICALPOETRYlove. It cannot be said that they expess a compensatingecstasy. The author of the weird and haunting" Sleep at Sea," " Does the road lead uphill all the way ?""Passing away, saith the world, passing away," "Byday she woos me, soft exceeding fair," is strangelyakin to Donne, whose religious poetry is also overshadowedby fear and breathes the spirit of one whowould feel more love and confidence than he does.They are both far from the spirit of Herbert whoseThe Temple is a sonnet-sequence in which the lovers areGod and his own soul, the longing of Vaughan to breakthrough the dividing veil, the ecstasies of Crashaw.She had neither the passion and courage of EmilyBronte nor the fine ardent spirit and eager sympathyof the more faulty artist Elizabeth Barrett Browning.It is the lyrical spontaneity and the delicate, conscientiousart of her cloistered poetry that has given itthe life it has.Arthur O'Shaughnessy's Music and Moonlight (1874)has the qualities its name indicates, and illustrates inthe clear way that minor work often does the subordinationof content to suggestion by colour andharmony. He had, Professor Saintsbury declares, the"characteristic of Irish word musicians, since Mooreat least—the air almost of an improvisation"; and "inthis respect, as in some others, is more like Poe thanany purely English poet." He is, one might say, aMoore of a later fashion in poetry, remembered bytwo poems in which there is, besides the light andcunning music of many others, that qualificationto which I have referred more than once—a freshand somewhat surprising approach to a familiartheme. One is the ode which opens Music andMoonlight:118