A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry

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"Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange."

So it was that Hawthorne's "fancy" first won a public for his stories,
while it is by his imagination that he holds his place as an artist. For
the deeply imaginative line of lyric verse, like the imaginative
conception of novelist or dramatist, often puzzles or repels a poet's
contemporaries. Jeffrey could find no sense in Wordsworth's superb couplet
in the "Ode to Duty":

"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are
fresh and strong."

And oddly enough, Emerson, the one man upon this side of the Atlantic from
whom an instinctive understanding of those lines was to be expected, was
as much perplexed by them as Jeffrey.

_6. Lyric Expression_

Is it possible to formulate the laws of lyric expression? "I do not mean
by expression," said Gray, "the mere choice of words, but the whole dress,
fashion, and arrangement of a thought."
[Footnote: Gray's _Letters_, vol. 2, p. 333. (Gosse ed.)]
Taking expression, in this larger sense, as the final element in that
threefold process by which poetry comes into being, and which has been
discussed in an earlier chapter, we may assert that there are certain
general laws of lyric form. One of them is the law of brevity. It is
impossible to keep the lyric pitch for very long. The rapture turns to
pain. "I need scarcely observe," writes Poe in his essay on "The Poetic
Principle," "that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites,
by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this
elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychical
necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitle
a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a
composition of any great length. After the lapse of half an hour, at the
very utmost, it flags--fails--a revulsion ensues--and then the poem is, in
effect, and in fact, no longer such."

In another passage, from the essay on "Hawthorne's 'Twice-Told Tales,'"
Poe emphasizes this law of brevity in connection with the law of unity of
impression. It is one of the classic passages of American literary
criticism:

"Were we bidden to say how the highest genius could be most
advantageously employed for the best display of its own powers, we
should answer, without hesitation--in the composition of a rhymed poem,
not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour. Within this
limit alone can the highest order of true poetry exist. We need only
here say, upon this topic, that, in almost all classes of composition,
the unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance.
It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in
productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting. We may
continue the reading of a prose composition, from the very nature of
prose itself, much longer than we can preserve, to any good purpose, in
the perusal of a poem. This latter, if truly fulfilling the demands of
the poetic sentiment, induces an exaltation of the soul which cannot be
long sustained. All high excitements are necessarily transient. Thus a
long poem is a paradox. And, without unity of impression, the deepest
effects cannot be brought about. Epics were the offspring of an
imperfect sense of Art, and their reign is no more. A poem _too_ brief
may produce a vivid, but never an intense or enduring impression.
Without a certain continuity of effort--without a certain duration or
repetition of purpose--the soul is never deeply moved."

Gray's analysis of the law of lyric brevity is picturesque, and too little
known:

"The true lyric style, with all its flights of fancy, ornaments, and
heightening of expression, and harmony of sound, is in its nature
superior to every other style; which is just the cause why it could not
be borne in a work of great length, no more than the eye could bear to
see all this scene that we constantly gaze upon,--the verdure of the
fields and woods, the azure of the sea-skies, turned into one dazzling
expanse of gems. The epic, therefore, assumed a style of graver colors,
and only stuck on a diamond (borrowed from her sister) here and there,
where it best became her.... To pass on a sudden from the lyric glare to
the epic solemnity (if I may be allowed to talk nonsense)...."
[Footnote: Gray's _Letters_, vol. 2, p. 304. (Gosse ed.)]

It is evident that the laws of brevity and unity cannot be disassociated.
The unity of emotion which characterizes the successful lyric corresponds
to the unity of action in the drama, and to the unity of effect in the
short story. It is this fact which Palgrave stressed in his emphasis upon
"some single thought, feeling, or situation." The sonnets, for instance,
that most nearly approach perfection are those dominated by one thought.
This thought may be turned over, indeed, as the octave passes into the
sextet, and may be viewed from another angle, or applied in an unexpected
way. And yet the content of a sonnet, considered as a whole, must be as
integral as the sonnet's form. So must it be with any song. The various
devices of rhyme, stanza and refrain help to bind into oneness of form a
single emotional reflection of some situation or desire.

Watts-Dunton points out that there is also a law of simplicity of
grammatical structure which the lyric disregards at its peril. Browning
and Shelley, to mention no lesser names, often marred the effectiveness of
their lyrics by a lack of perspicuity. If the lyric cry is not easily
intelligible, the sympathy of the listener is not won. Riddle-poems have
been loved by the English ever since Anglo-Saxon times, but the
intellectual satisfaction of solving a puzzle may be purchased at the cost
of true poetic pleasure. Let us quote Gray once more, for he had an
unerring sense of the difficulty of moulding ideas into "pure, perspicuous
and musical form."

"Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical,
is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry. This I have always aimed
at, and never could attain; the necessity of rhyming is one great
obstacle to it: another and perhaps a stronger is, that way you have
chosen of casting down your first ideas carelessly and at large, and
then clipping them here and there, and forming them at leisure; this
method, after all possible pains, will leave behind it in some places a
laxity, a diffuseness; the frame of a thought (otherwise well invented,
well turned, and well placed) is often weakened by it. Do I talk
nonsense, or do you understand me?"
[Footnote: Gray's _Letters_, vol. 2, p. 352. (Gosse ed.)]

Poe, whose theory of poetry comprehends only the lyric, and indeed chiefly
that restricted type of lyric verse in which he himself was a master,
insisted that there was a further lyric law,--the law of vagueness or
indefiniteness. "I know," he writes in his "Marginalia," "that
indefiniteness is an element of the true music--I mean of the true musical
expression. Give to it any undue decision--imbue it with any very
determinate tone--and you deprive it, at once, of its ethereal, its ideal,
its intrinsic and essential character. You dispel its luxury of dream. You
dissolve the atmosphere of the mystic upon which it floats. You exhaust it
of its breath of faery. It now becomes a tangible and easily appreciable
idea--a thing of the earth, earthy."

This reads like a defence of Poe's own private practice, and yet many
poets and critics are inclined to side with him. Edmond Holmes, for
instance, goes quite as far as Poe. "The truth is that poetry, which is
the expression of large, obscure and indefinable feelings, finds its
appropriate material in _vague_ words--words of large import and with many
meanings and shades of meaning. Here we have an almost unfailing test for
determining the poetic fitness of words, a test which every true poet
unconsciously, but withal unerringly, applies. Precision, whether in the
direction of what is commonplace or of what is technical, is always
unpoetical."
[Footnote: _What is Poetry_, p. 77. London and New York, 1900.]
This doctrine, it will be observed, is in direct opposition to the Imagist
theory of "hardness and economy of speech; the exact word," and it also
would rule out the highly technical vocabulary of camp and trail,
steamship and jungle, with which Mr. Kipling has greatly delighted our
generation. No one who admires the splendid vitality of "McAndrew's Hymn"
is really troubled by the slang and lingo of the engine-room.

One of the most charming passages in Stedman's _Nature and Elements of
Poetry_ (pp. 181-85) deals with the law of Evanescence. The "flowers that
fade," the "airs that die," "the snows of yester-year," have in their very
frailty and mortality a haunting lyric value. Don Marquis has written a
poem about this exquisite appeal of the transient, calling it "The
Paradox":

"'T is evanescence that endures;
The loveliness that dies the soonest has the longest life."

But we touch here a source of lyric beauty too delicate to be analysed in
prose. It is better to read "Rose Aylmer," or to remember what Duke Orsino
says in Twelfth Night:

"Enough; no more:
'T is not so sweet now as it was before."

7._ Expression and Impulse_

A word must be added, nevertheless, about lyric expression as related to
the lyric impulse. No one pretends that there is such a thing as a set
lyric pattern.

"There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right."

No two professional golfers, for instance, take precisely the same stance.
Each man's stance is the expression, the result, of his peculiar physical
organization and his muscular habits. There are as many "styles" as there
are players, and yet each player strives for "style," i.e. economy and
precision and grace of muscular effort, and each will assert that the
chief thing is to "keep your eye on the ball" and "follow through." "And
every single one of them is right."

Apply this analogy to the organization of a lyric poem. Its material, as
we have seen, is infinitely varied. It expresses all conceivable "states
of soul." Is it possible, therefore, to lay down any general formula for
it, something corresponding to the golfer's "keep your eye on the ball"
and "follow through"? John Erskine, in his book on _The Elizabethan
Lyric_, ventures upon this precept: "Lyric emotion, in order to express
itself intelligibly, must first reproduce the cause of its existence. If
the poet will go into ecstasies over a Grecian urn, to justify himself he
must first show us the urn." Admitted. Can one go farther? Mr. Erskine
attempts it, in a highly suggestive analysis:
"Speaking broadly, all successful lyrics have three parts. In the first
the emotional stimulus is given--the object, the situation, or the thought
from which the song arises. In the second part the emotion is developed to
its utmost capacity, until as it begins to flag the intellectual element
reasserts itself. In the third part the emotion is finally resolved into a
thought, a mental resolution, or an attribute."
[Footnote: _The Elizabethan Lyric_, p. 17.]
Let the reader choose at random a dozen lyrics from the _Golden Treasury_,
and see how far this orderly arrangement of the thought-stuff of the lyric
is approximated in practice. My own impression is that the critic
postulates more of an "intellectual element" than the average English song
will supply. But at least here is a clear-cut statement of what one may
look for in a lyric. It shows how the lyric impulse tends to mould lyric
expression into certain lines of order.

Most of the narrower precepts governing lyric form follow from the general
principles already discussed. The lyric vocabulary, every one admits,
should not seem studied or consciously ornate, for that breaks the law of
spontaneity. It may indeed be highly finished, the more highly in
proportion to its brevity, but the clever word-juggling of such
prestidigitators as Poe and Verlaine is perilous. Figurative language must
spring only from living, figurative thought, otherwise the lyric falls
into verbal conceits, frigidity, conventionality. Stanzaic law must follow
emotional law, just as Kreisler's accompanist must keep time with
Kreisler. All the rich devices of rhyme and tone-color must heighten
and not cloy the singing quality. But why lengthen this list of truisms?
The combination of genuine lyric emotion with expertness of technical
expression is in reality very rare. Goethe's "Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh"
and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" are miracles of art, yet one was scribbled in
a moment, and the other dreamed in an opium slumber. The lyric is the
commonest, and yet, in its perfection, the rarest type of poetry; the
earliest, and yet the most modern; the simplest, and yet in its laws of
emotional association, perhaps the most complex; and it is all these
because it expresses, more intimately than other types of verse, the
personality of the poet.

CHAPTER VIII

RELATIONSHIPS AND TYPES OF THE LYRIC

"_Milk-Woman_. What song was it, I pray? Was it 'Come, shepherds, deck
your heads'? or, 'As at noon Dulcina rested'? or, 'Phillida flouts me'?
or, 'Chevy Chase'? or, 'Johnny Armstrong'? or, 'Troy Town'?"
ISAAC WALTON, _The Complete Angler_

We have already considered, at the beginning of the previous chapter, the
general relationship of the three chief types of poetry. Lyric, epic and
drama, i.e. song, story and play, have obviously different functions to
perform. They may indeed deal with a common fund of material. A given
event, say the settlement of Virginia, or the episode of Pocahontas,
provides situations and emotions which may take either lyric or narrative
or dramatic shape. The mental habits and technical experience of the poet,
or the prevalent literary fashions of his day, may determine which general
type of poetry he will employ. There were born lyrists, like Greene in the
Elizabethan period, who wrote plays because the public demanded drama, and
there have been natural dramatists who were compelled, in a period when
the theatre fell into disrepute, to give their material a narrative form.
But we must also take into account the dominant mood or quality of certain
poetic minds. Many passages in narrative and dramatic verse, for instance,
while fulfilling their primary function of telling a story or throwing
characters into action, are colored by what we have called the lyric
quality, by that passionate, personal feeling whose natural mode of
expression is in song. In Marlowe's _Tamburlaine_, for instance, or Victor
Hugo's _Hernani_, there are superb pieces of lyric declamation, in which
we feel that Marlowe and Hugo themselves--not the imaginary Tamburlaine
and Hernani--are chanting the desires of their own hearts. Arnold's
"Sohrab and Rustum," after finishing its tragic story of the son slain by
the unwitting father, closes with a lyric description of the majestic Oxus
stream flowing on to the Aral sea. Objective as it all seems, this close
is intensely personal, permeated with the same tender stoicism which
colors Arnold's "Dover Beach" and "A Summer Night." The device of using a
Nature picture at the end of a narrative, to heighten, by harmony or
contrast, the mood induced by the story itself, was freely utilized
by Tennyson in his _English Idylls_, such as "Audley Court," "Edwin
Morris," "Love and Duty," and "The Golden Year." It adds the last touch of
poignancy to Robert Frost's "Death of the Hired Man." These descriptive
passages, though lacking the song form, are as purely lyrical in their
function as the songs in _The Princess _or the songs in _The Winter's
Tale_.

_1. The Blending of Types_

While the scope of the present volume, as explained in the Preface,
precludes any specific study of drama and epic, the reader must bear in
mind that the three main types of poetry are not separated, in actual
practice, by immovably hard and fast lines. Pigeonhole classifications of
drama, epic and lyric types are highly convenient to the student for
purposes of analysis. But the moment one reads a ballad like "Edward,
Edward" (_Oxford_, No. 373) or "Helen of Kirconnell" (_Oxford_, No. 387)
the pigeon-hole distinctions must be subordinated to the actual fact that
these ballads are a blend of drama, story and song. The "form" is lyrical,
the stuff is narrative, the mode of presentation is often that of purely
dramatic dialogue.

Take a contemporary illustration of this blending of types. Mr. Vachel
Lindsay has told us the origins of his striking poem "The Congo." He was
already in a "national-theme mood," he says, when he listened to a sermon
about missionaries on the Congo River. The word "Congo" began to haunt
him. "It echoed with the war-drums and cannibal yells of Africa." Then,
for a list of colors for his palette, he had boyish memories of Stanley's
_Darkest Africa_, and of the dances of the Dahomey Amazons at the World's
Fair in Chicago. He had seen the anti-negro riots in Springfield,
Illinois. He had gone through a score of negro-saloons--"barrel-houses"--
on Eleventh Avenue, New York, and had "accumulated a jungle impression
that remains with me yet." Above all, there was Conrad's _Heart of
Darkness_. "I wanted to reiterate the word Congo--and the several refrains
in a way that would echo stories like that. I wanted to suggest
the terror, the reeking swamp-fever, the forest splendor, the
black-lacquered loveliness, and above all the eternal fatality of Africa,
that Conrad has written down with so sure a hand. I do not mean to say,
now that I have done, that I recorded all these things in rhyme. But every
time I rewrote 'The Congo' I reached toward them. I suppose I rewrote it
fifty times in these two months, sometimes three times in one day."

It is not often that we get so veracious an account of the making
of a poem, so clear a conception of the blending of sound-motives,
color-motives, story-stuff, drama-stuff, personal emotion, into a single
whole.

Nor is there any clear separation of types when we strive to look back to
the primitive origins of these various forms of poetry. In the opinion of
many scholars, the origins are to be traced to a common source in the
dance. "Dances, as overwhelming evidence, ethnological and sociological,
can prove, were the original stuff upon which dramatic, lyric and epic
impulses wove a pattern that is traced in later narrative ballads mainly
as incremental repetition. Separation of its elements, and evolution to
higher forms, made the dance an independent art, with song, and then
music, ancillary to the figures and the steps; song itself passed to lyric
triumphs quite apart from choral voice and choral act; epic went its
artistic way with nothing but rhythm as memorial of the dance, and the
story instead of dramatic situation; drama retained the situation, the
action, even the chorus and the dance, but submitted them to the shaping
and informing power of individual genius."
[Footnote: Gummere, _The Popular Ballad_, p. 106.]
In another striking passage, Professor Gummere asks us to visualize "a
throng of people without skill to read or write, without ability to
project themselves into the future, or to compare themselves with the
past, or even to range their experience with the experience of other
communities, gathered in festal mood, and by loud song, perfect rhythm and
energetic dance, expressing their feelings over an event of quite local
origin, present appeal and common interest. Here, in point of evolution,
is the human basis of poetry, the foundation courses of the pyramid."

_2. Lyrical Element in Drama_

We cannot here attempt to trace, even in outline, the course of this
historic evolution of genres. But in contemporary types of both dramatic
and narrative poetry, there may still be discovered the influence of lyric
form and mood. We have already noted how the dramatist, for all of his
supposed objectivity, cannot refrain from coloring certain persons and
situations with the hues of his own fancy. Ibsen, for instance, injects
his irony, his love for symbolism, his theories for the reconstruction of
society, into the very blood and bone of his characters and into the
structure of his plots. So it is with Shaw, with Synge, with Hauptmann,
with Brieux. Even if their plays are written in prose, these men
are still "makers," and the prose play may be as highly subjective in
mood, as definitely individual in phrasing, as full of atmosphere, as if
it were composed in verse.

But the lyric possibilities of the drama are more easily realized if we
turn from the prose play to the play in verse, and particularly to those
Elizabethan dramas which are not only poetical in essence, but which
utilize actual songs for their dramatic value. No less than thirty-six of
Shakspere's plays contain stage-directions for music, and his marvelous
command of song-words is universally recognized. The English stage had
made use of songs, in fact, ever since the liturgical drama of the Middle
Ages. But Shakspere's unrivalled knowledge of _stage-craft_, as well as
his own instinct for harmonizing lyrical with theatrical effects, enabled
him to surpass all of his contemporaries in the art of using songs to
bring actors on and off the stage, to anticipate following action, to
characterize personages, to heighten climaxes, and to express motions
beyond the reach of spoken words.
[Footnote: These points are fully discussed in J. Robert Moore's Harvard
dissertation (unpublished) on The Songs in the English Drama.]
The popularity of such song-forms as the "madrigal," which was sung
without musical accompaniment, made it easy for the public stage to cater
to the prevalent taste. The "children of the Chapel" or "of Paul's," who
served as actors in the early Elizabethan dramas, were trained choristers,
and songs were a part of their stock in trade. Songs for sheer
entertainment, common enough upon the stage when Shakspere began to write,
turned in his hands into exquisite instruments of character revelation and
of dramatic passion, until they became, on the lips of an Ophelia or a
Desdemona, the most touching and poignant moments of the drama. "Music
within" is a frequent stage direction in the later Elizabethan plays, and
if one remembers the dramatic effectiveness of the Easter music,
off-stage, in Goethe's _Faust_, or the horn in _Hernani_, one can
understand how Wagner came to believe that a blending of music with poetry
and action, as exhibited in his "music-dramas," was demanded by the ideal
requirements of dramatic art. Wagner's theory and practice need not be
rehearsed here. It is sufficient for our purpose to recall the
indisputable fact that in some of the greatest plays ever written, lyric
forms have contributed richly and directly to the total dramatic effect.

_3. The Dramatic Monologue_

There is still another _genre_ of poetry, however, where the
inter-relations of drama, of narrative, and of lyric mood are peculiarly
interesting. It is the dramatic monologue. The range of expressiveness
allowed by this type of poetry was adequately shown by Browning and
Tennyson, and recent poets like Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost
and Amy Lowell have employed it with consummate skill. The dramatic
monologue is a dynamic revelation of a soul in action, not a mere static
bit of character study. It chooses some representative and specific
occasion,--let us say a man's death-bed view of his career, as in "The
Bishop orders his Tomb" or the first "Northern Farmer." It is something
more than a soliloquy overheard. There is a listener, who, though without
a speaking part, plays a very real role in the dialogue. For the dramatic
monologue is in essence a dialogue of which we hear only the chief
speaker's part, as in "My Last Duchess," or in E. A. Robinson's "Ben
Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford." It is as if we were watching and
listening to a man telephoning. Though we see and hear but one person, we
are aware that the talk is shaped to a certain extent by the personality
at the other end of the line. In Tennyson's "Rizpah," for example, the
characteristics of the well-meaning, Bible-quoting parish visitor
determine some of the finest lines in the old mother's response. In
Browning's "Andrea del Sarto" the painter's wife, Lucrezia, says never a
word, but she has a more intense physical presence in that poem than many
of the _dramatis personae_ of famous plays. Tennyson's "Ulysses" and "Sir
Galahad" and "The Voyage of Maeldune" are splendid soliloquies and nothing
more. The first "Locksley Hall" is likewise a soliloquy, but in the second
"Locksley Hall" and "To-Morrow," where scraps of talk from the unseen
interlocutor are caught up and repeated by the speaker in passionate
rebuttal, we have true drama of the "confrontation" type. We see a whole
soul in action.

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