A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry

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Now this intense, dynamic fashion of revealing character through narrative
talk--and it is commonly a whole life-story which is condensed within the
few lines of a dramatic monologue--touches lyricism at two points. The
first is the fact that many dramatic monologues use distinctively lyric
measures. The six-stress anapestic line which Tennyson preferred for his
later dramatic monologues like "Rizpah" is really a ballad measure, and is
seen as such to its best advantage in "The Revenge." But in his monologues
of the pure soliloquy type, like "St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad," the metre
is brilliantly lyrical, and the lyric associations of the verse are
carried over into the mood of the poem. And the other fact to be
remembered is that the poignant self-analysis and self-betrayal of the
dramatic monologue, its "egoism" and its ultimate and appalling
sincerities, are a part of the very nature of the lyric impulse. These
revealers of their souls may use the speaking, rather than the singing
voice, but their tones have the deep, rich lyric intimacy.

4. _Lyric and Narrative_

In narrative poetry, no less than in drama, we must note the intrusion of
the lyric mood, as well as the influence of lyric forms. Theoretically,
narrative or "epic" poetry is based upon an objective experience.
Something has happened, and the poet tells us about it. He has heard or
read, or possibly taken part in, an event, and the event, rather than the
poet's thought or feeling about it, is the core of the poem. But as soon
as he begins to tell his tale, we find that he is apt to "set it out" with
vivid description. He is obliged to paint a picture as well as to spin a
yarn, and not even Homer and Virgil--"objective" as they are supposed to
be---can draw a picture without betraying something of their attitude and
feeling towards their material. Like the messenger in Greek drama,
their voices are shaken by what they have seen or heard. In the popular
epic like the Nibelungen story, there is more objectivity than in the epic
of art like _Jerusalem Delivered_ or _Paradise Lost_. We do not know who
put together in their present form such traditional tales as the _Lay of
the Nibelungs_ and _Beowulf_, and the personal element in the narrative is
only obscurely felt, whereas _Jerusalem Delivered_ is a constant
revelation of Tasso, and the personality of Milton colors every line in
_Paradise Lost_. When Matthew Arnold tells us that Homer is rapid, plain,
simple and noble, he is depicting the characteristics of a poet as well as
the impression made by the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. Those general traits
of epic poetry which have been discussed ever since the Renaissance, like
"breadth," and "unity" and the sustained "grand" style, turn ultimately
upon the natural qualities of great story-tellers. They are not mere
rhetorical abstractions.

The narrative poet sees man as accomplishing a deed, as a factor in an
event. His primary business is to report action, not to philosophize or to
dissect character or to paint landscape. Yet so sensitive is he to the
environing circumstances of action, and so bent upon displaying the
varieties of human motive and conduct, that he cannot help reflecting in
his verse his own mental attitude toward the situations which he depicts.
He may surround these situations, as we have seen, with all the beauties
and pomps and terrors of the visible world. In relating "God's ways to
man" he instinctively justifies or condemns. He cannot even tell a story
exactly as it was told to him: he must alter it, be it ever so slightly,
to make it fit his general conceptions of human nature and human fate. He
gives credence to one witness and not to another. His imagination plays
around the noble and base elements in his story until their original
proportions are altered to suit his mind and purpose. Study the Tristram
story, as told by Gottfried of Strassburg, by Malory, Tennyson,
Arnold, Swinburne and Wagner, and you will see how each teller betrays his
own personality through these instinctive processes of transformation of
his material. It is like the Roman murder story told so many times over in
Browning's _Ring and the Book_: the main facts are conceded by each
witness, and yet the inferences from the facts range from Heaven to Hell.

Browning is of course an extreme instance of this irruption of the poet's
personality upon the stuff of his story. He cannot help lyricising and
dramatizing his narrative material, any more than he can help making all
his characters talk "Browningese." But Byron's tales in verse show the
same subjective tendency. He was so little of a dramatist that all of his
heroes, like Poe's, are images of himself. No matter what the raw material
of his narrative poems may be, they become uniformly "Byronic" as he
writes them down. And all this is "lyricism," however disguised. William
Morris, almost alone among modern English poets, seemed to stand gravely
aloof from the tales he told, as his master Chaucer stood smilingly aloof.
Yet the "tone" of Chaucer is perceived somehow upon every page, in spite
of his objectivity.

The whole history of medieval verse Romances, indeed, illustrates this
lyrical tendency to rehandle inherited material. Tales of love, of
enchantment, of adventure, could not be held down to prosaic fact. Whether
they dealt with "matter of France," or "matter of Brittany," whether a
brief "lai" or a complicated cycle of stories like those about Charlemagne
or King Arthur, whether a merry "fabliau" or a beast-tale like "Reynard
the Fox," all the Romances allow to the author a margin of mystery, an
opportunity to weave his own web of brightly colored fancies. A specific
event or legend was there, of course, as a nucleus for the story, but the
sense of wonder, of strangeness in things, of individual delight in
brocading new patterns upon old material, dominated over the sense of
fact. "Time," said Shelley, "which destroys the beauty and the use of the
story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest
them, augments that of poetry, and forever develops new and wonderful
applications of the eternal truth which it contains.... A story of
particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which
should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which
is distorted."

And in modern narrative verse, surely, the line between "epic" quality and
"lyric" quality is difficult to draw. Choose almost at random a half-dozen
story-telling poems from the _Oxford Book of English Verse_, say "The
Ancient Mariner," "The Burial of Sir John Moore," "La Belle Dame sans
Merci," "Porphyria's Lover," "The Forsaken Merman," "He Fell among
Thieves." Each of these poems narrates an event, but what purely lyric
quality is there which cannot be found in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and
"The Ancient Mariner"? And does not each of the other poems release and
excite the lyric mood?

We must admit, furthermore, that narrative measures and lyric measures are
frequently identical, and help to carry over into a story a singing
quality. Ballad measures are an obvious example. Walter Scott's facile
couplets were equally effective for story and for song. Many minor species
of narrative poetry, like verse satire and allegory, are often composed in
traditional lyric patterns. Even blank verse, admirably suited as it is
for story-telling purposes, yields in its varieties of cadence many a bar
of music long associated with lyric emotion. Certainly the blank verse of
Wordsworth's "Michael" is far different in its musical values from the
blank verse, say, of Tennyson's _Princess_--perhaps truly as different as
the metre of _Sigurd the Volsung_ is from that of _The Rape of the Lock_.
The perfect matching of metrical form to the nature of the narrative
material, whether that material be traditional or firsthand, simple or
complex, rude or delicate, demands the finest artistic instinct. Yet it
appears certain that many narrative measures affect us fully as
much through their intimate association with the moods of song as through
their specific adaptiveness to the purposes of narrative.

_5. The Ballad_

The supreme illustration of this blending of story and song is the ballad.
The word "ballad," like "ode" and "sonnet," is very ancient and has been
used in various senses. We think of it to-day as a song that tells a
story, usually of popular origin. Derived etymologically from _ballare_,
to dance, it means first of all, a "dance-song," and is the same word as
"ballet." Solomon's "Song of Songs" is called in the Bishops' Bible of
1568 "The Ballet of Ballets of King Solomon." But in Chaucer's time a
"ballad" meant primarily a French form of lyric verse,--not a narrative
lyric specifically. In the Elizabethan period the word was used loosely
for "song." Only after the revival of interest in English and Scottish
popular ballads in the eighteenth century has the word come gradually to
imply a special type of story-telling song, with no traces of individual
authorship, and handed down by oral tradition. Scholars differ as to
the precise part taken by the singing, dancing crowd in the composition
and perpetuation of these traditional ballads. Professor Child,
the greatest authority upon English and Scottish balladry, and
Professors Gummere, Kittredge and W. M. Hart have emphasized the
element of "communal" composition, and illustrated it by many types of
song-improvisation among savage races, by sailors' "chanties," and negro
"work-songs." It is easy to understand how a singing, dancing crowd
carries a refrain, and improvises, through some quick-tongued individual,
a new phrase, line or stanza of immediate popular effect; and it is also
easy to perceive, by a study of extant versions of various ballads, such
as Child printed in glorious abundance, to see how phrases, lines and
stanzas get altered as they are passed from lip to lip of unlettered
people during the course of centuries. But the actual historical
relationship of communal dance-songs to such narrative lyrics as were
collected by Bishop Percy, Ritson and Child is still under debate.
[Footnote: See Louise Pound, "The Ballad and the Dance," _Pub. Mod. Lang.
Ass._, vol. 34, No. 3 (September, 1919), and Andrew Lang's article on
"Ballads" in Chambers' _Cyclopedia of Eng. Lit._, ed. of 1902.]

"All poetry," said Professor Gummere in reply to a critic of his theory of
communal composition of ballads, "springs from the same poetic impulse,
and is due to individuals; but the conditions under which it is made,
whether originally composed in a singing, dancing throng and submitted to
oral tradition, or set down on paper by the solitary and deliberate poet,
have given birth to that distinction of 'popular' and 'artistic,' or
whatever the terms may be, which has obtained in some form with nearly all
writers on poetry since Aristotle." Avoiding questions that are still in
controversy, let us look at some of the indubitable characteristics of the
"popular" ballads as they are shown in Child's collection.
[Footnote: Now reprinted in a single volume of the "Cambridge Poets"
(Houghton Mifflin Company), edited with an introduction by G. L.
Kittredge.]
They are impersonal. There is no trace whatever of individual authorship.
"This song was made by Billy Gashade," asserts the author of the immensely
popular American ballad of "Jesse James." But we do not know what "Billy
Gashade" it was who first made rhymes about Robin Hood or Johnny
Armstrong, or just how much help he had from the crowd in composing them.
In any case, the method of such ballads is purely objective. They do not
moralize or sentimentalize. There is little description, aside from the
use of set, conventional phrases. They do not "motivate" the story
carefully, or move logically from event to event. Rather do they "flash
the story at you" by fragments, and then leave you in the dark. They
leap over apparently essential points of exposition and plot structure;
they omit to assign dialogue to a specific person, leaving you to guess
who is talking. Over certain bits of action or situation they linger as if
they hated to leave that part of the story. They make shameless use of
"commonplaces," that is, stock phrases, lines or stanzas which are
conveniently held by the memory and which may appear in dozens of
different ballads. They are not afraid of repetition,--indeed the theory
of choral collaboration implies a constant use of repetition and refrain,
as in a sailor's "chanty." One of their chief ways of building a situation
or advancing a narrative is through "incremental repetition," as Gummere
termed it, i.e. the successive additions of some new bits of fact as the
bits already familiar are repeated.

"'Christine, Christine, tread a measure for me!
A silken sark I will give to thee.'

"'A silken sark I can get me here,
But I'll not dance with the Prince this year.'

"'Christine, Christine, tread a measure for me,
Silver-clasped shoes I will give to thee!'

"'Silver-clasped shoes,'" etc.

American cowboy ballads show the same device:

"I started up the trail October twenty-third,
I started up the trail _with the 2-U herd_."

Strikingly as the ballads differ from consciously "artistic" narrative in
their broken movement and allusive method, the contrast is even more
different if we consider the naive quality of their refrains. Sometimes
the refrain is only a sort of musical accompaniment:

"There was an old farmer in Sussex did dwell,
(_Chorus of Whistlers_)
There was an old farmer in Sussex did dwell
And he had a bad wife, as many knew well.
(_Chorus of Whistlers_)"

Or,

"The auld Deil cam to the man at the pleugh,
_Rumchy ae de aidie_."

Sometimes the words of the choral refrain have a vaguely suggestive
meaning:

"There were three ladies lived in a bower,
_Eh vow bonnie_
And they went out to pull a flower,
_On the bonnie banks of Fordie_."

Sometimes the place-name, illustrated in the last line quoted, is
definite:

"There was twa sisters in a bower,
_Edinburgh, Edinburgh_,
There was twa sisters in a bower,
_Stirling for aye_
There was twa sisters in a bower,
There came a knight to be their wooer,
_Bonny Saint Johnston stands upon Tay_."

But often it is sheer faery-land magic:

"He's ta'en three locks o' her yellow hair,
_Binnorie, O Binnorie_!
And wi' them strung his harp sae rare
_By the bonnie milldams o' Binnorie_."
(_Oxford_, No.376.)

It is through the choral refrains, in fact, that the student of lyric
poetry is chiefly fascinated as he reads the ballads. Students of epic
and drama find them peculiarly suggestive in their handling of narrative
and dramatic material, while to students of folklore and of primitive
society they are inexhaustible treasures. The mingling of dance-motives
and song-motives with the pure story-element may long remain obscure, but
the popular ballad reinforces, perhaps more persuasively than any type of
poetry, the conviction that the lyrical impulse is universal and
inevitable. As Andrew Lang, scholar and lover of balladry, wrote
long ago: "Ballads sprang from the very heart of the people and flit from
age to age, from lip to lip of shepherds, peasants, nurses, of all the
class that continues nearest to the state of natural man. The whole soul
of the peasant class breathes in their burdens, as the great sea resounds
in the shells cast up on the shores. Ballads are a voice from secret
places, from silent peoples and old times long dead; and as such they stir
us in a strangely intimate fashion to which artistic verse can never
attain."
[Footnote: _Encyclopaedia Brittanica_, article "Ballads."]

_6. The Ode_

If the ballad is thus an example of "popular" lyricism, with a narrative
intention, an example of "artistic" lyricism is found in the Ode. Here
there is no question of communal origins or of communal influence upon
structure. The ode is a product of a single artist, working not naively,
but consciously, and employing a highly developed technique. Derived from
the Greek verb meaning "to sing," the word "ode" has not changed its
meaning since the days of Pindar, except that, as in the case of the word
"lyric" itself, we have gradually come to grow unmindful of the original
musical accompaniment of the song. Edmund Gosse, in his collection of
_English Odes_, defines the ode as "any strain of enthusiastic and exalted
lyrical verse directed to a fixed purpose and dealing progressively with
one dignified theme." Spenser's "Epithalamium" or marriage ode,
Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality," Tennyson's elegiac
and encomiastic "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," Lowell's
"Harvard Commemoration Ode," are among the most familiar examples of the
general type.

English poetry has constantly employed, however, both of the two metrical
species of odes recognized by the ancients. The first, made up of uniform
stanzas, was called "Aeolian" or "Horatian,"--since Horace imitated the
simple, regular strophes of his Greek models. The other species of ode,
the "Dorian," is more complex, and is associated with the triumphal odes
of Pindar. It utilizes groups of voices, and its divisions into so-called
"strophe," "antistrophe" and "epode" (sometimes called fancifully "wave,"
"answering wave" and "echo") were determined by the movements of the
groups of singers upon the Greek stage, the "singers moving to one side
during the strophe, retracing their steps during the antistrophe (which
was for that reason metrically identical with the strophe), and standing
still during the epode."
[Footnote: See Bronson's edition of the poems of Collins. Athenaeum
Press.]

It must be observed, however, that the English odes written in strictly
uniform stanzas differ greatly in the simplicity of the stanzaic pattern.
Andrew Marvell's "Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland,"
Collins's "Ode to Evening," Shelley's "To a Skylark," and Wordsworth's
"Ode to Duty" are all in very simple stanza forms. But Collins's "Ode on
the Superstitions of the Highlands," Shelley's "Ode to Liberty" and
Coleridge's "Ode to France" follow very complicated patterns, though all
the stanzas are alike. The English "Horatian" ode, then, while exhibiting
the greatest differences in complexity of stanzaic forms, is
"homostrophic."

To understand the "Pindaric" English ode, we must remember that a few
scholars, like Ben Jonson, Congreve and Gray, took peculiar pleasure in
reproducing the general effect of the Greek strophic arrangement of
"turn," "counterturn" and "pause." Ben Jonson's "Ode to Sir Lucius Cary
and Sir H. Morison" (_Oxford_, No. 194) has been thought to be the first
strictly Pindaric ode in English, and Gray's "Bard" and "Progress of
Poesy" (_Oxford_, Nos. 454, 455) are still more familiar examples of this
type. But the great popularity of the so-called "Pindaric" ode in English
in the seventeenth century was due to Cowley, and to one of those periodic
loyalties to lawlessness which are characteristic of the English. For
Cowley, failing to perceive that Pindar's apparent lawlessness was
due to the corruption of the Greek text and to the modern ignorance of the
rules of Greek choral music, made his English "Pindaric" odes an outlet
for rebellion against all stanzaic law. The finer the poetic frenzy, the
freer the lyric pattern! But, alas, rhetoric soon triumphed over
imagination, and in the absence of metrical restraint the ode grew
declamatory, bombastic, and lowest stage of all, "official," the last
refuge of laureates who felt obliged to produce something sonorous in
honor of a royal birthday or wedding. This official ode persisted long
after the pseudo-Pindaric flag was lowered and Cowley had become
neglected.

With the revival of Romantic imagination, however, came a new interest in
the "irregular" ode, whose strophic arrangement ebbs and flows without
apparent restraint, subject only to what Watts-Dunton termed "emotional
law." Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" moves in
obedience to its own rhythmic impulses only, like Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"
and Emerson's "Bacchus." Metrical variety can nowhere be shown more freely
and gloriously than in the irregular ode: there may be any number of lines
in each strophe, and often the strophe itself becomes dissolved into
something corresponding to the "movement" of a symphony. Masterpieces like
William Vaughn Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation" and Francis Thompson's
"Hound of Heaven" reveal of course a firm intellectual grasp upon the
underlying theme of the ode and upon the logical processes of its
development. But although we may follow with keen intellectual
delight these large, free handlings of a lyrical theme, there are few
readers of poetry whose susceptibility to complicated combinations of
rhyme-sound allows them to perceive the full verbal beauty of the great
irregular odes. Even in such regular strophes as those of Keats's "Grecian
Urn," who remembers that the rhyme scheme of the first stanza is unlike
that of the following stanzas? Or that the second stanza of the "Ode to a
Nightingale" runs on four sounds instead of five? Let the reader test his
ear by reading aloud the intricate sound-patterns employed in such elegies
as Arnold's "Scholar Gypsy" (_Oxford_, No. 751) or Swinburne's "Ave atque
Vale" (_Oxford_, No. 810), and then let him go back to "Lycidas"
(_Oxford_, No. 317), the final test of one's responsiveness to the
blending of the intellectual and the sensuous elements in poetic beauty.
If he is honest with himself, he will probably confess that neither his
ear nor his mind can keep full pace with the swift and subtle demands made
upon both by the masters of sustained lyric energy. But he will also
become freshly aware that the ode is a supreme example of that union of
excitement with a sense of order, of liberty with law, which gives Verse
its immortality.

_7. The Sonnet_

The sonnet, likewise, is a lyric form which illustrates the delicate
balance between freedom and restraint. Let us look first at its structure,
and then at its capacity for expressing thought and feeling.

Both name and structure are Italian in origin, "sonetto" being the
diminutive of "suono," sound. Dante and Petrarch knew it as a special
lyric form intended for musical accompaniment. It must have fourteen
lines, neither more nor less, with five beats or "stresses" to the line.
Each line must end with a rhyme. In the arrangement of the rhymes the
sonnet is made up of two parts, or rhyme-systems: the first eight lines
forming the "octave," and the last six the "sestet." The octave is made up
of two quatrains and the sestet of two tercets. There is a main pause in
passing from the octave to the sestet, and frequently there are minor
pauses in passing from the first quatrain to the second, and from the
first tercet to the last.

Almost all of Petrarch's sonnets follow this rhyme-scheme: for the octave,
_a b b a a b b a_; for the sestet, either _c d e c d e_ or _c d c d c d_.
This strict "Petrarchan" form has endured for six centuries. It has been
adopted by poets of every race and language, and it is used to-day as
widely or more widely than ever. While individual poets have constantly
experimented with different rhyme-schemes, particularly in the sestet, the
only really notable invention of a new sonnet form was made by the
Elizabethans. Puttenham's _Arte of English Poesie_ (1589) declares that
"Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder and Henry Earl of Surrey, having travelled
into Italy and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of
the Italian poesie,... greatly polished our rude and homely manner of
vulgar poesie.... Their conceits were lofty, their style stately, their
conveyance cleanly, their terms proper, their metre sweet and
well-proportioned, in all imitating very naturally and studiously their
Master Francis Petrarch."

This is charming, but as a matter of fact both Wyatt and Surrey, with
natural English independence, broke away from the strict Petrarchan rhyme
form. Wyatt liked a final couplet, and Surrey used a rhyme-scheme which
was later adopted by Shakspere and is known to-day as the "Shaksperean"
form of sonnet: namely, three quatrains made up of alternate rhymes--a
separate rhyme-scheme for each quatrain--and a closing couplet. The rhymes
consequently run thus: _a b a b c d c d e f e f g g_. To the Petrarchan
purist this is clearly no sonnet at all, in spite of its fourteen
five-beat, rhyming lines. For the distinction between octave and sestet
has disappeared, there is a threefold division of the first twelve lines,
and the final couplet gives an epigrammatic summary or "point" which
Petrarch took pains to avoid.

The difference will be still more clearly manifest if we turn from a
comparison of rhyme-structure to the ordering of the thought in the
Petrarchan sonnet. Mark Pattison, a stout "Petrarchan," lays down these
rules in the Preface to his edition of Milton's Sonnets:
[Footnote: D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1883.]

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