lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICALPOETRYthe deck but his wings support his steps. Julian andMaddalo "is Byron and fire," Mr Symons says—anethereal fire, a rarer music. Elsewhere, if we set asidedeliberate experiments in a manner that was not hisown, as The Cenci and some satires, his voice is thatof the rhapsodist when it is not that of the singer"pinnacled dim in the intense inane." Alastor (1816)is a continuous rhapsody in a blank verse more sustainedlymusical than Wordsworth's, if Tintern Abbeyand the greatest rhapsodical passages of The Preludeare clearer in imaginative vision and touch a deeperchord of feeling. If Wordsworth's rhapsodies can giveplace to prosaic preachifying, Shelley's can, and do attimes in The Revolt of Islam and even the finer, if veryunequal, Prometheus Unbound, pass into shrill declamation,just as his voice, musical in reading poetry, grewharsh and discordant when he argued excitedly. ButShelley in his greatest poems rises above both rhapsodyand declamation to song, whether elaborate song,resembling in sustained and varied harmony, if not indetail of form, "those magnific odes and hymns whereinPindarus and Callimachus are in most things worthy,"or the simpler, more piercing strains of his shorterlyrics which in musical quality have no rival.In the first class I would place the Lines Writtenamong the Euganean Hills (1818), in which Shelleyseems to me to rise above the shifting rhapsody ofAlastor to a sustained song, an ode with a suggestionof Milton's architectonic art; Epipsychidion, whichclimbs from moment to moment of ecstatic feeling toculminate in the glowing description of the ideal islandof retreat:Famine or Blight,Pestilence, War, and Earthquake, never light48