lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LYRICprophecy was to give to his lyrics a new and piercingsweetness. The memory of childhood and the realisationof its significance for the solution of the mysteryof life of which he was in quest filled Blake's Songs ofInnocence with an ecstasy of joy such as ThomasTraherne alone had experienced before him; andBlake is the better poet. In song after song from theIntroduction,Piping down a valley wild,Blake, in iambic, anapaestic, and trochaic rhythms,in lines variously divided but readily resolvable intoone or other of the units I have described in the firstlecture, with some variations, achieves what it isdifficult to describe as anything but perfection, a' series of lyrics quite like which there is nothing elsein our language. The gamut of emotion is not wide;there are regions of feeling and experience which theydo not touch and which, when Blake came to essaythem, were to trouble his soul and disturb his artisticpower to shape and to control; but within their range,in purity, sweetness, and intensity of feeling, in simpleperfection of diction and variety of rhythm, these songshave no rivals. Doubtless some are more perfect thanothers, at least one or two are a little less perfect—A Dream and On Another's Sorrow, which savour alittle of Watt's simple sermon style, with a difference.But to choose the best among Holy Thursday, InfufitJoy, Little Lamb, and others is precarious work. Andwith all their simplicity of feeling and diction, theseare metaphysical lyrics. Their inspiration is not thesensuous charm of childhood, but a deeper thought,a passionate faith in the significance of what childhoodreveals, or seemed to Blake to reveal.25