lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICALPOETRYHear the voice of the Bard !Who Present, Past, and Future sees ;Whose ears have heardThe Holy Word,That walk'd among the ancient trees,Calling the lapsed SoulAnd weeping in the evening dew ;That might controlThe starry pole ;And fallen, fallen light renew !That has a Miltonic turn and elaboration of period, andTyger ! Tyger ! burning bright,In the forests of the nightmoves with a sterner tread than any of the Songs ofInnocence. But the promise was not fulfilled. Fewof the other lyrics show any advance on the metricalachievement of the first collection; many fall shortof it. From song Blake turned to the free rhythmof the Book of Thel, or the prose of the Marriage ofHeaven and Hell, or the rhythm that oscillates betweenmetre and rhythmical prose of the Prophetic Books.Only occasionally does song re-emerge, and that, whenit achieves excellence at all, is in the mood and modeof what is best in the Songs of Experience, as The Birds,or the great verse in The Grey Monk:For a tear is an ineffectual thing,And a sigh is the sword of an angel king,And the bitter groan of a martyr's woeIs an arrow from the Almighty's bow.Blake's best lyrics were his earliest. There was nodevelopment of his powers in this direction such asthe lyrics of his greatest successor, Shelley, will reveal.But Blake's poems were read at the time by no one28