lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

"THENINETIES"the less romantic Protestant. Francis Thompson'sPoems (1893), Sister Songs (1895), and New Poems (1897)owed some of their reputation to the loyalty andenthusiasm of his friends and co-religionists. In hisearliest notable lyric, Dream Tryst, he writes in themanner more tense than intense—as Patmore said ofthe older poet—of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and hisschool:The breaths of kissing night and dayWere mingled in the eastern Heaven :Throbbing with unheard melodyShook Lyra all its star-chord seven :When dusk shrunk cold, and light trod shy,And dawn's grey eyes were troubled grey;And souls went palely up the sky,And mine to Lucide.It is more tense than intense because no more than inPoe's Ulalume can one tell exactly what it is all about,and there is something of the same tensity of feelingabout lyrics like The Daisy and The Poppy whereThompson too strikes, along with that of his love forchildren, the musical note of self-pity:I hang 'mid men my needless head,And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread :The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeperTime shall reap, but after the reaperThe world shall glean of me, me the sleeper.Love, / fall into the claws of Time :But lasts within a leaved rhyme,All that the world of me esteems—My withered dreams, my withered dreams.The same note is played on in the longer odes, excusablyin those on the more personal themes of his145 10