lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICALPOETRY.had something to do with the change of the spirit ofpoetry, the quickening of a more lyrical temper, notall the results of which, one may say, were a gain forpoetry. Whatever its limitations of feeling and diction,the elegant or meditative eighteenth-century lyricis often preferable to the fluent, facile, sentimentallyric of which the next century was to produce suchan abundance to the delight of our domestic middleclassreaders. Poetry begets poetry. The revived interestin our older poetry (not its themes only but thediction and rhythm), the ballad, Elizabethan song,Spenser and Chaucer, the better appreciation of theirbeauties, dispelled the taste for conventional decorationand dressing to advantage, and, the form reacting uponthe temper of poetry, gave us such songs as Blake'sand Scott'sThe wild winds weep,And the night is a-coldProud Maisie is in the woodWalking so early.To realise the effect of form upon the spirit of poetry,one need but compare Chatterton's poems in theEnglish of his own day with such poems in his spuriousMiddle English asO sing unto my roundelay,O drop the briny tear with me ;Dance no more at holiday,Like a running river be :My love is dead,Gone to his death-bed,All under the willow-tree.But the newer poetry was not altogether a revivalof old moods and old modes, though there was to bemuch of that from Scott's ballads to the virelays and22