lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LYRICadapted itself and given controlled expression to eachphase in his experience. Even the songs take on achanging colour, fromtoandWhen icicles hang by the wallAnd Dick the shepherd blows his nail,Fear no more the heat o' the sunNor the furious winter's rages,Full fathom five thy father lies.Milton's poetry, too, changed its character with thevicissitudes through which that bitterly disappointedbut indomitable spirit passed with an unwavering confidencein his own apprehension of truth and justice.There was a long furrow ploughed between L'Allegroand Samson, but both are the works of a great poet.Now Blake, if one may venture to say it, never quitegrew up, or did so in a somewhat lop-sided fashion.The child in him would not accept the disillusionmentof experience except on condition that he mighttransmute, might sublimate it, and to do so involvedhim in a mental conflict the record of which is thechaotic Prophetic Books. His passionate sense of theinnocence and right to happiness of a child would notaccept the inhibitions with which adolescence findsitself beset, nor the control of the prudence which madeShakespeare the first burgher in Stratford-on-Avdn.Of the effects of this on his work generally it is notmy business to speak, but one of the first and mostobvious of these effects was on the form of his poetry.In The Songs of Experience one is made aware of thedeepening of thought and feeling in a richer timbre,and the form promises to take an ampler scope:27