lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY, KEATSdays are gone away," are delightful poems, worthcomparing with Shelley's Euganean Hills. Keats'svisionary scenes are the more concrete and vivid,Shelley's the more atmospheric; and if Shelley's musicis the more plangent, Keats's lighter handling has anElizabethan mellowness and charm, nor does it lacka genuine lyrical note:Where the daisies are rose-scented,And the rose herself has gotPerfume which on earth is not;Where the nightingale doth singNot a senseless, tranced thing,But divine melodious truth.But the ode, not the lyric, was to be the field of Keats'striumph over all his contemporaries. Dryden's andGray's odes are brilliant achievements in the artificialand rhetorical; Wordsworth's Intimations is a greatpoem, but an unequal ode; Shelley's odes, expresslyso called, and on an elaborate scale—Ode to Libertyand Ode to Naples—are failures; there are, it seems tome, just two odes entirely satisfying in imagination,evolution, and music (" echoing and ringing withmusic") before Keats, and those are Spenser's Epithalamionand Milton's Lycidas. To these Keats hasadded Ode to a Nightingale, To Autumn, Ode on aGrecian Urn, and, on a slightly lower level of elaborationor perfection, Ode on Melancholy, Ode to Psyche.I put the three I have named first because there ismore in them of the subtle and elaborate evolutionof a thought, or a train of thought, which is the chiefdistinction between an ode and a song on the onehand, an ode and a sonnet on the other. The'Ode onMelancholy reads to me like an expanded sonnet, the55