lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICAL POETRY.Niebelungen measure in which half a foot is droppedin the middle and a whole foot at the end of the line:Thou sayest it I am outcast A : for a God that lacketh mirth. A AThis is not so common, it seems to me, in lyricmeasures. There are also more exceptional variantswhere longer pauses are made or a half-line is insertedamong the full rhythms; but a reader will be surprisedto find how many lyrics whose measures asprinted seem to the eye so various are to the ear oneor other of the above or combinations of them.But I am not writing a treatise on metre. What Iam after is this, that a scrutiny of the raison d?etre ofthe metres we call lyrical bears out what I have said;one feels—if one has the feeling for poetry, at all—that some poems sing more than others, that we readthem as knowing that these things are sung, not said.But there are no sharp divisions to be drawn. As thelines lengthen, as the measures are extended, we stillfeel the note of song, even of ecstatic song, "thelyric cry":Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting ;The Soul that rises with us, our life's StarHath had elsewhere its setting,And cometh from afar.The ode also is song, choric song in origin, but wefeel the difference between its elaborate cadences andthe song that seems to carol in our brains as we read it.And as we settle down towards narrative and dramaticverse we draw nearer and nearer to speech. Weremain always above the level of prose speeches, borneon the wings of verse, but draw nearer to it even whenthe speech is impassioned. From blank verse Shakespearewill pass quite easily into prose, as Shelley in16