lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICALPOETRYOr bristled curl at a touch their snouts in a ball;Or cast their web between bramble and thorny hook ;The good physician Melampus loved them all,Among them walked as a scholar who reads his book.In other poems the " metaphysical" strain inMeredith's as in Donne's and some of Browning'spoems, the swift passionate rush of the stream ofthought, flows in swifter measures—anapaestic, trochaicfour-foot lines, or, if iambic, with the heavybeat on the stressed syllables which is characteristicof the seventeenth-century "metaphysicals'" use ofthe Common and Long Measure. Good examples arethe Night of Frost in May, The Woods of Westermain,Hard Weather, A Faith on Trial, The Day of theDaughter of Hades. Few of them are altogether freeof the intolerable obscurities, harshnesses, and infelicitiesreferred to earlier, but, if one has patience towin through to what the poet is trying to articulate,one gets something of the pleasurable sting derivablefrom the, in their different way, harsh and obscurelyrics of Donne. In the same metre as that poet'sThe Extasie, Meredith's The Thrush in February isotherwise reminiscent of that poem:Since Pain and Pleasure on each handLed our wild steps from slimy rockTo yonder sweeps of garden land,We breathe but to be sword or block.The sighting brain her good decreeAccepts ; obeys those guides, in faith,By reason hourly fed, that she,To some the clod, to some the wraith,Is more, no mask,—a flame, a stream.Flame, stream, are we in mid-career,From torrent source, delirious dream,To heaven reflecting current clear.128