lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY, KEATSAnd oft by yon blue gushing streamShall Sorrow lean her drooping head,And feed deep thought with many a dream,And lingering pause and lightly tread ;Fond wretch ! as if her step disturb'd the dead !Byron found a worse model, for his early attempts,in the facile, sentimental lyric in anapaestic and iambicmeasures of "the late Thomas Little, Esq.,'' i.e.Thomas Moore. Byron had never the courage torecognise the merits of unpopular poets like Wordsworthand Coleridge (for whose Christabel he professeda patronising regard) and later Keats. In his ridiculous"triangular Gradus ad Parnassum" he gave the highestplace t6 Scott, followed by Rogers, and thereafterMoore and Campbell; Southey, Wordsworth, andColeridge standing equal at the bottom. None ofthose he placed so high was qualified to teach him apurer dialect, a finer music. But Byron had a temperament,and when that began to make itself felt hislyrics, conventional or undistinguished in language andverse, acquire a timbre that is all their own. Hisanapaests in "I enter thy garden of roses," and "TheAssyrian came down like the wolf on the fold," andothers have a momentum and rush that is unlike thefacile ripple of Moore's songs, even the finer butlighter swing of Scott's Toung Lochinvar and BonnieDundee. Nor are such lyrics as "There's not a joythe world can give,"orWhen we two partedIn silence and tears,There be none of Beauty's daughters,She walks in Beauty like the nightOf cloudless climes and starry skies45