lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICALPOETRYBut it was not in this direction, Coleridge quickly felt,that the effect he was in quest of lay. The artisticsophistication of the simple ballad was to be got neitherby a studied simplesse nor by a studied archaism, but bythe enhancement of the essential qualities of imagination,dramatic poignancy, and a subtler, sweeter music.It is as though Wordsworth took Coleridge out to thefields to gather daisies and buttercups, and lo! theyturned into orchids and exotics at his touch. Thelanguage of no ballad could be simpler, more natural,yet there is all the difference in the world betweenthis language and that of prose or the genuinely popularballad, wherever you take it:It ceased ; yet still the sails made onA pleasant noise till noon,A noise like of a hidden brookIn the leafy month of June,That to the sleeping woods all nightSingeth a quiet tune.The only obvious enrichment of the ballad-measurewhich Coleridge allows himself is this addition of acouplet, which is not uncommon in the older ballads,and yet the music is not that of the old ballads itselfbut something rare and exotic. Coleridge in thisballad is the source of all that the later Pre-Raphaelites,from Keats in La Belle Dame sans Merci and some ofTennyson's earliest lyrics to Rossetti and Morris andSwinburne and Oscar Wilde, were to be ever in questof—the subtle, the exotic. Metrically, and in thesuggestion of the magical, Christabel and Kubla Khanpromised more, perhaps, but they remained fragments.Coleridge's refashioning of the ballad is his great andmiraculous achievement. But except in the metrical38