lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

TENNYSON, BROWNING, & SOME OTHERSperhaps no thought moved Tennyson so simply andintensely as "the passion of the past," the thoughtthat:All things are taken from us, and becomePortions and parcels of the dreadful past.In In Memoriam also, a sequence of meditative lyricswhose simpler style and verse heightens the impressionof sincere, poignant feeling, there are sections of greatlyrical power and beauty. If the hero of Maud is asomewhat hysterical person and the varying cadencesnot all equally effective, there are three rememberablelyrics: " I have led her home, my love, my only friend,""Come into the garden, Maud," and "O that 'twerepossible."The troubled spirit, too, in which Tennyson encounteredthe religious and political trend of the age,the beginning of which he had hailed with high hopes,found expression in his latest poems in some arrestingnotes—Fastness, Crossing the Bar. The later dialectpoems, too, and Rizpah are written in a similar sombretone. But the most notable additions which he madeto his earlier work are of much the same kind, surprisingand delighting rather by the freshness andbeauty of their technique than by any deep note offeeling—The Revenge, The Daisy, the lines To Virgil,The Voyage of Maeldune.In speaking of the great romantics I found itnecessary to recognise that the lyrical afflatus whichis so potent in their work did not express itself in theform of song alone, or even of more elaborate ode,but in rhapsodical poems, in short trochaic lines, andeven in measures more proper to spoken poetry as decasyllabiccouplets (Shelley's Epipsychidion), Spenserians69