lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURYLYRICwho could feel their influence and benefit by it. Thepredominant influence in English lyric—Scottish songtaking a course of its own had already been given adeeper timbre and fierier glow from the amazing temperamentof Robert Burns—was that of Gray, Collins,and Akenside. The meditative, pensive, elegiac lyricadorned with personifications, as of Contemplation andVirtue, was the vogue and continued to be so for sometime after the new century opened. One sees theirinfluence in Coleridge's early verses, even in Byron'sHours of Idleness. "The bard who soars to elegise anass" does so in the traditional manner:I hail thee Brother—spite of the fool's scorn !And fain would take thee with me, in the DellOf Peace and mild Equality to dwell,Where Toil shall call the charmer Health his bride,And Laughter tickle Plenty's ribless side,and Byron himself had delighted in the same eleganciesand accepted conventions:Repentance plac'd them as before ;Forgiveness join'd her gentle name ;So fair the inscription seem'd once moreThat Friendship thought it still the same.Thus might the Record now have been,But, ah, in spite of Hope's endeavour,Or Friendship's tears, Pride rush'd between,And blotted out the line for ever.Wordsworth's two lyrics of 1789 are in the tone andthe measure of Collins's Fidele. Melancholy, pleasingmelancholy, was the dominant mood, and the elegant,restrained style in which the mood might be expressedwas stereotyped. Cowper, whose melancholy wassincere and profound, and who knew the value of29