A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

4. The Objects of the Lyric Vision

Let us look more closely at some of the objects of the lyric vision; the sources or material, that is to say, for the lyric emotion. Goethe’s often-quoted classification is as convenient as any: the poet’s vision, he says, may be directed upon Nature, Man or God.

And first, then, upon Nature. One characteristic of lyric poetry is the clearness with which single details or isolated objects in Nature may be visualized and reproduced. The modern reflective lyric, it is true, often depends for its power upon some philosophical generalization from a single instance, like Emerson’s “Rhodora” or Wordsworth’s “Small Celandine.” It may even attempt a sort of logical or pseudo-logical deduction from given premises, like Browning’s famous

“Morning’s at seven;

The hillside’s dew-pearled;

The lark’s on the wing:

The snail’s on the thorn;

God’s in his Heaven—

All’s right with the world!”

The imagination cannot be denied this right to synthesize and to interpret, and nevertheless Nature offers even to the most unphilosophical her endless profusion of objects that awaken delight. She does not insist that the lyric poet should generalize unless he pleases. Moth and snail and skylark, daisy and field-mouse and water-fowl, seized by an eye that is quick to their poetic values, their interest to men, furnish material enough for lyric feeling. The fondness of Romantic poets for isolating a single object has been matched in our day by the success of the Imagists in painting a single aspect of some phenomenon—

“Light as the shadow of the fish

That falls through the pale green water—”

any aspect, in short, provided it affords the “romantic quiver,” the quick, keen sense of the beauty in things. What an art-critic said of the painter W. M. Chase applies equally well to many contemporary Imagists who use the forms of lyric verse: “He saw the world as a display of beautiful surfaces which challenged his skill. It was enough to set him painting to note the nacreous skin of a fish, or the satiny bloom of fruit, or the wind-smoothed dunes about Shinnecock, or the fine specific olive of a woman’s face…. He took objects quite at their face value, and rarely invested them with the tenderness, mystery and understanding that comes from meditation and remembered feelings…. We get in him a fine, bare vision, and must not expect therewith much contributary enrichment from mind and mood.” [Footnote: The Nation, November 2, 1916.] Our point is that this “fine, bare vision” is often enough for a lyric. It has no time for epic breadth of detail, for the rich accumulation of harmonious images which marks Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum” or Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes.”

The English Romantic poets were troubled about the incursion of scientific fact into the poet’s view of nature. The awful rainbow in heaven might be turned, they thought, through the curse of scientific knowledge, into the “dull catalogue of common things.” But Wordsworth was wiser than this. He saw that if the scientific fact were emotionalized, it could still serve as the stuff of poetry. Facts could be transformed into truths. No aspect of Tennyson’s lyricism is more interesting than his constant employment of the newest scientific knowledge of his day, for instance, in geology, chemistry and astronomy. He set his facts to music. Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s poignant sonnet about immortality is an illustration of the ease with which a lyric poet may find material in scientific fact, if appropriated and made rich by feeling. [Footnote: Quoted in chap. VIII, section 7.]

If lyric poetry shows everywhere this tendency to humanize its “bare vision” of Nature, it is also clear that the lyric, as the most highly personalized species of poetry, exhibits an infinite variety of visions of human life. Any anthology will illustrate the range of observation, the complexity of situations and desires, the constant changes in key, as the lyric attempts to interpret this or that aspect of human emotion. Take for example, the Elizabethan love-lyric. Here is a single human passion, expressing itself in the moods and lyric forms of one brief generation of our literature. Yet what variety of personal accent, what kaleidoscopic shiftings of mind and imagination, what range of lyric beauty! Or take the passion for the wider interests of Humanity, expressed in the lyrics of Schiller and Burns, running deep and turbid through Revolutionary and Romantic verse, and still coloring—perhaps now more strongly than ever—the stream of twentieth-century poetry. Here is a type of lyric emotion where self-consciousness is lost, absorbed in the wider consciousness of kinship, in the dawning recognition of the oneness of the blood and fate of all nations of the earth.

The purest type of lyric vision is indicated in the third word of Goethe’s triad. It is the vision of God. Here no physical fact intrudes or mars. Here thought, if it be complete thought, is wholly emotionalized. Such transcendent vision, as in the Hebrew lyrists and in Dante, is itself worship, and the lyric cry of the most consummate artist among English poets of the last generation is simply an echo of the ancient voices:

“Hallowed be Thy Name—Hallelujah!”

If Tennyson could not phrase anew the ineffable, it is no wonder that most hymn-writers fail. They are trying to express in conventionalized religious terminology and in “long and short metre” what can with difficulty be expressed at all, and if at all, by the unconscious art of the Psalms or by a sustained metaphor, like “Crossing the Bar” or the “Recessional.” The medieval Latin hymns clothed their transcendent themes, their passionate emotions, in the language of imperial Rome. The modern sectaries succeed best in their hymnology when they choose simple ideas, not too definite in content, and clothe them, as Whittier did, in words of tender human association, in parables of longing and of consolation.

5. The Lyric Imagination

The material thus furnished by the lyric poet’s experience, thought and emotion is reshaped by an imagination working simply and spontaneously. The lyrist is born and not made, and he cannot help transforming the actual world into his own world, like Don Quixote with the windmills and the serving-women. Sometimes his imagination fastens upon a single trait or aspect of reality, and the resultant metaphor seems truer than any logic.

“Death lays his icy hand on Kings.”

“I wandered lonely as a cloud.”

Sometimes his imagination fuses various aspects of an object into a composite effect:

“A lily of a day

Is fairer far in May,

Although it fall and die that night;

It was the plant and flower of light.”

The lyric emotion, it is true, does not always catch at imagery. It may deal directly with the fact, as in Burns’s immortal

“If we ne’er had met sae kindly,

If we ne’er had loved sae blindly,

Never loved, and never parted,

We had ne’er been broken-hearted.”

The lyric atmosphere, heavy and clouded with passionate feeling, idealizes objects as if they were seen through the light of dawn or sunset. It is never the dry clear light of noon.

“She was a phantom of delight.”

“Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart,

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea,

Pure as the naked heavens….”

This idealization is often not so much a magnification of the object as a simplification of it. Confusing details are stripped away. Contradictory facts are eliminated, until heart answers to heart across the welter of immaterialities.

Although the psychologists, as has been already noted, are now little inclined to distinguish between the imagination and the fancy, it remains true that the old distinction between superficial or “fanciful” resemblances, and deeper or “imaginative” likenesses, is a convenient one in lyric poetry. E. C. Stedman, in his old age, was wont to say that our younger lyrists, while tuneful and fanciful enough, had no imagination or passion, and that what was needed in America was some adult male verse. The verbal felicity and richness of fancy that characterized the Elizabethan lyric were matched by its sudden gleams of penetrative imagination, which may be, after all, only the “fancy” taking a deeper plunge. In the familiar song from The Tempest, for example, we have in the second and third lines examples of those fanciful conceits in which the age delighted, but that does not impair the purely imaginative beauty of the last three lines of the stanza,—the lines that are graven upon Shelley’s tombstone in Rome:

“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