lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY, KEATSUpon its mountain-peaks ; blind vultures, theySail onward far upon their fatal way :The winged storms, chanting theit thunder-psalmTo other lands, leave azure chasms of calmOver this isle, or weep themselves in dew,From which its fields and woods ever renewTheir green and golden immortality.And from the sea there rise, and from the skyThere fall clear exhalations, soft and bright,Veil after veil, each hiding some delight,Which Sun or Moon or Zephyr draw aside,Till the isle's beauty, like a naked brideGlowing at once with love and loveliness,Blushes and trembles at its own excess.Lastly, there is Adonais, the greatest of these sustainedlyrics, a poem in which Shelley's sense of somethingamiss in the nature of things finds its fullest expressionwhen he discovers that kings and priests and all theother ills that flesh is heir to are but shadows of oneradical evil—finite life; that death is the portal throughwhich we escape or return toThat Benediction which the eclipsing CurseOf birth can quench notIn each of these poems he hafe used a different measureand to each has given its fullest lyrical quality.Next to these in compass and elevation come moreformal odes as the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, ToConstantia, Singing, the Ode to the West Wind, whosevolume and vehemence raise it to the level of Adonuis,and the greater choral parts of Prometheus and yetmore of Hellas, for allowing all their poignancy andbeauty to the lyrics in the first act of the former, thoseof the third and fourth act seem to me too void of visionand content. Not all the rapture of Shelley's rhymescan compensate for the absence of any such vision as49 4