lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICALPOETRYAround its unexpanded buds ;Like many a voice of one delight,The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,The City's voice itself, is soft like Solitude's.In 1819, if he tries his hand at simpler, more popularmeasures in some of the political poems, he is allhimself in:Arise, arise, arise !There is blood on the earth that denies ye bread ;Be your wounds like eyesTo weep for the dead, the dead, the dead.What other grief were it just to pay ?Your sons, your wives, your brethren, were they ;Who said they were slain on the battle day ?To the same year belong, besides The West Wind, both"I arise from dreams of thee" and "The fountainsmingle with the river" as well as some lovely fragments.But 1820 is the culminating year of Shelley's moreecstatic lyrics—his nature lyrics, The Sensitive Plant,The Cloud, To a Skylark, Autumn: A Dirge, TheQuestion, all less interesting as transcripts of naturethan as musical utterances of Shelley's own dreams anddesires. To these add, also a nature lyric, the statelyHymn of Apollo, and the more bewitching Hymn of Pan,the most surprising and delighting of Shelley's stanzas,and perhaps the greatest of his lyrics in virtue of thesudden transition in the last stanza from a Bacchicecstasy to an all-too-human sorrow. And these areonly some of the shorter poems of this year, which wasalso the year of The Witch of Atlas and Adonais.In 1821 I seem to note a slight change of tone inShelley's lyrics. Epipsychidion indeed is in the mostecstatic vein; but the predominant note is that ofa piercing, yet a more resigned and controlled, sorrow:52