lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICALPOETRYweighted with the poet's sense of sorrow and a hopeakin to despair. All Shelley's heart pours itself outin the final song:The world's great age begins anew.Whatever men may think or come to think of theworth of Shelley as a thinker and prophet, his place asa singer, as a lyrical poet par excellence, could only bechallenged if our whole prosody underwent somechange that made the music of his rhythms andrhymes and patterns of sound no longer fully intelligible.If nevertheless one finds oneself preferringsome of the lyrics or odes of Blake and Wordsworth,it is only because the feeling they communicate is, orseems to be, of both more human and more enduringworth.The lyric measures, in which Shelley achieved hismost indubitable successes, and is most purely, uniquelyhimself, did not make the same appeal to Keats's lesssoaring and ardent, more meditative, more luxurioustemperament, loving to "load every rift with ore"—the ore of sensuous, felicitous epithets and richlycadenced rhythms. His one good song, "In a drearnightedDecember," he owes to Dryden, but in thefirst two verses surpasses his original. He wrote onegreat ballad, La Belle Dame sans Merely with themagic of Coleridge and a more passionate flow:I saw their starv'd lips in the gloamWith horrid warning gaped wide,And I awoke, and found me hereOn the cold hill's side.His trochaic musings in Fancy, "Bards of Passion andof Mirth," "Souls of Poets dead and gone," "No, those54