Chapter 2

And so we have Milton and Herrick, both poets, the one a great man, the other not. It is a wide difference. Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events. Milton is one of perhaps a dozen names in the history of the world's literature, Herrick--still with a fine enough distinction--one of something under two hundred in the history of our own. And yet they are left on equal terms in the possession of the purely poetic energy. Milton's achievement outweighs Herrick's, but for the reasons that I have mentioned, and not because poetry grows better by accumulation or because it is possible to prove, or even to satisfy any considerable majority of good judges, that--

Ye have been fresh and green, Ye have been filled with flowers, And ye the walks have been Where maids have spent their hours. You have beheld how they With wicker arks did come To kiss and bear away The richer cowslips home. You've heard them sweetly sing, And seen them in a round: Each virgin like a spring, With honeysuckles crown'd. But now we see none here Whose silvery feet did tread, And with dishevell'd hair Adorn'd this smoother mead. Like unthrifts, having spent Your stock and needy grown, You've left here to lament Your poor estates, alone,

is inferior, in specifically poetic quality, to

Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more, For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead, Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor; So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.

We come, then, to the consideration of this specific quality that distinguishes what we recognise as poetry from all other verbal expression. Returning for a moment to _Paradise Lost_, we find that here is a work of art of which the visible and external sign is words. That it has three qualities--there may be more, but it is not to the point--architectural power, moral exaltation and a sense of character, each of which, although it may be more impressive when presented as it were under the auspices of the poetic quality, can exist independently of it, as in _Tom Jones_, _Unto This Last_, and _The School for Scandal_ respectively; that there remains a last and dominating quality, which is not related to intellectual fusion of much diverse material, as is the first of those other qualities, or to the kind of material, as are the other two, but to extreme activity of the perceptive mood upon whatever object it may be directed, remembering that this activity is highly exacting as to the worthiness of objects in which it can concern itself. We find, further, that this is a quality which it has in common not with _Tom Jones_ or _Unto This Last_, but with a thing so inconsiderable in all other respects as those songs of Herrick's. And in each case we find that the token of this quality is a conviction that here are words that could not have been otherwise chosen or otherwise placed; that here is an expression to rearrange which would be to destroy it--a conviction that we by no means have about the prose of Fielding and Ruskin, admirable as it is. We find, in short, that this quality equals a maximum of imaginative pressure freeing itself in the best words in the best order. And this quality is the specific poetic quality; the presence or absence of which should decide for us, without any other consideration whatever, whether what is before us is or is not poetry. And it seems to me, further, that what we have in our minds when we speak of lyric is precisely this same quality; that lyric and the expression of pure poetic energy unrelated to other energies are the same thing.

THE CLASSIFICATION OF POETRY

It is not yet the place to discuss the question of lyric forms--to consider what kind of thing it is that people mean when they speak of "a lyric." First we must consider the commonly accepted opinion that a lyric is an expression of personal emotion, with its implication that there is an essential difference between a lyric and, say, dramatic or narrative poetry. A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being. To talk of dramatic poetry, epic poetry and narrative poetry is to talk of three different things--epic, drama and narrative; but each is combined with a fourth thing in common, which is poetry, which, in turn, is in itself of precisely the same nature as the lyric of which we are told that it is yet a further kind of poetry. Let us here take a passage from a play and consider it in relation to this suggestion:

CLOWN. I wish you all joy of the worm.

CLEOPATRA. Farewell.

CLOWN. You must think this, look you, that the worm will do his kind.

CLEOPATRA. Ay, ay; farewell.

CLOWN. Look you, the worm is not to be trusted but in the keeping of wise people; for indeed there is no goodness in the worm.

CLEOPATRA. Take thou no care; it shall be heeded.

CLOWN. Very good. Give it nothing, I pray you, for it is not worth the feeding.

CLEOPATRA. Will it eat me?

CLOWN. You must not think I am so simple but I know the devil himself will not eat a woman; I know that a woman is a dish for the gods, if the devil dress her not. But, truly, these same whoreson devils do the gods great harm in their women, for in every ten that they make the devils mar five.

CLEOPATRA. Well, get thee gone; farewell.

CLOWN. Yes, forsooth; I wish you joy of the worm.

_Re-enter_ IRAS.

CLEOPATRA. Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me; now no more The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip. Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear Antony call; I see him rouse himself To praise my noble act; I hear him mock The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men To excuse their after wrath; husband, I come: Now to that name my courage prove my title! I am fire and air; my other elements I give to baser life. So; have you done? Come then, and take the last warmth of my lips. Farewell, kind Charmian; Iras, long farewell.

I have chosen this passage not because of its singular beauty, but because it is peculiarly to our present purpose. In the first place, Shakespeare, by using both prose and verse--which he by no means always does under similar circumstances--makes a clear formal division between what is poetry and what is not. It is all magnificently contrived drama, but down to the Clown's exit it is not poetry. The significance of the Clown does not demand of Shakespeare's imaginative mood that highest activity that would force him to poetry. The short dialogue has great excellence, but not this kind of excellence. The fact that it occurs in what we call a poetic drama does not make it poetry; its fine dramatic significance does not give it poetic significance. We are living in a world of dramatic poetry, and yet we have here a perfectly clear distinction between the drama and the poetry, since we definitely have the one without the other. Then, when Cleopatra begins her farewell speech, we have the addition of poetry and a continuance of the drama. And this speech illustrates perfectly the suggestion that the quality which is commonly said to be exclusively lyric is the quality of all poetry. It illustrates it in a particularly emphatic way. For not only is it unquestionably poetry, but it is also unquestionably dramatic. Very clearly the poet is not here speaking out of his own actual experience; it is a woman speaking, one who is a queen: who is wrecked upon the love of kings: who knows that she is about to die a strange and sudden death. So that if the impulse of the poetry in poetic drama were essentially different from the impulse of lyric, if the personal experience which is said to be this latter were something differing in kind from the experience which is the source of what is called dramatic poetry, then here is a case where the essential difference could surely be perceived and defined. It cannot be defined, for it does not exist. It is a fallacy to suppose that experience is any the less personal because it is concerned with an event happening to someone else. If my friend falls to a mortal sickness my experience, if my imaginative faculty is acute, is as poignant as his; if he achieves some great good fortune, my delight is as vigorous as his. And if I am a poet, and choose to express the grief or pleasure as if it were his concern and not mine, the experience does not become one whit less personal to me. You may, if it is convenient, call the result lyric if I speak as though the experience is my own and dramatic poetry if I speak of it as being his, but what you are really saying is that in the one case I am producing pure poetry, and in the other I am producing poetry in conjunction with dramatic statement. The poetic quality is the same in either case. Cleopatra's speech is notable for two things: its dramatic significance, which is admittedly contrived by Shakespeare, and its poetry which springs from an intensity of experience which is clearly, unless we juggle with words, Shakespeare's and not Cleopatra's. The fact that the material upon which the poet's mood has worked has not been confined to some event that has happened to himself but has included the condition of an imagined being does not alter the radical significance of his experience or influence the essential nature of its product. The poetic energy may operate on many things through a million moods, but the character of the energy is immutable. And when we speak of lyric, thinking of the direct and simple activity of this energy unmodified by the process of any other energies, we shall, if we get our mind clear about it, see that we mean pure poetry, and we shall recognise this poetry as being constant in its essential properties in whatever association we may henceforth find it.

If it is allowed, as, for the reasons I have attempted to set out, I think it rightly may be, that the purely poetic energy is not a variable quality, that of any given expression of a man's mental activity it can definitely be said that it is or is not poetry, there remains one question to be answered,--Can one poem be better than another, if both are truly poems? Or can one poet, by reason of his poetry, be better than another poet by reason of his? Is Keats, for example, a better poet than Suckling? Every good judge of poetry, if that question were put, would be likely to answer without hesitation--Yes, he is. And yet the answer, although the reason for it may be found and, in a sense, allowed, does not in any way discredit the principle that has been defined. With a passage from each of these poets at his best before us, let us see what we find. This from Keats:

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

And this from Suckling:

Why so pale and wan, fond lover? Prythee, why so pale? Will, when looking well can't move her, Looking ill prevail? Prythee, why so pale?

Why so dull and mute, young sinner? Prythee, why so mute? Will, when speaking well can't win her, Saying nothing do't? Prythee, why so mute?

Quit, quit, for shame! This will not move; This cannot take her. If of herself she will not love, Nothing can make her: The Devil take her!

The poetic energy in Keats is here entirely undisturbed. I do not mean that it is not united to any other energy--though here it happens not to be--as in poetic drama, where it is united to the dramatic energy and is still undisturbed in its full activity, but that it is here freely allowed to work itself out to its consummation without any concession, conscious or unconscious, to any mood that is not non-poetic but definitely anti-poetic, in which case, although unchanged in its nature, it would be constrained in a hostile atmosphere. Keats's words are struck out of a mood that tolerates nothing but its own full life and is concerned only to satisfy that life by uncompromising expression. The result is pure poetry, or lyric. But when we come to Suckling's lines we find that there is a difference. The poetic energy is still here. Suckling has quite clearly experienced something in a mood of more than common intensity. It does not matter that the material which has been subjected to the mood is not in itself very profound or passionate. Another poet, Wither, with material curiously like Suckling's to work upon, achieves poetry as unquestionable if not so luxuriant as Keats's.

Shall I, wasting in despair, Die because a woman's fair? Or make pale my cheeks with care Because another's rosy are? Be she fairer than the day, Or the flowery mead in May-- If she think not well of me What care I how fair she be?

To object that there is an emotional gaiety in this which is foreign to Keats is but to state a personal preference. It is, indeed, a preference which is common and founded upon very general experience. Most of us have, from the tradition and circumstance of our own lives, a particular sympathy with the grave and faintly melancholy beauty which is the most recurrent note in fine poetry throughout the world, but this does not establish this particular strain of beauty as being in any way essential to poetry. It is related to an almost universal condition, but it is a fertile source of poetry, not one with the poetic energy itself. It would be absurd to impugn a man's taste because he preferred Chaucer's poetry, which has scarcely a touch of this melancholy, to Shelley's, which is drenched in it, as it would be absurd to quarrel with it because he obtained strictly imaginative pleasure more readily from

Shall I, wasting in despair

than from

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

His preference merely shows him to belong to a minority: it does not show him to be insensible to poetry. For Wither's mood, by the evidence of its expression, although it may not be so universal in its appeal nor so adventurous in design, is here active to the degree of poetry no less surely than is Keats's. And yet, while it would be an error of judgment to rate Wither below Keats (by virtue of these illustrations) in pure poetic energy, it would, I think, be quite sound so to rate Suckling by the witness of his lyric. For while Wither's mood, in its chosen activity, is wholly surrendered to the poetic energy, Suckling's is not. It is contaminated by one of those external activities which I have spoken of as being hostile to poetry. Although he perceives his subject with the right urgency, he is unwilling to be quite loyal to his perception. He makes some concession to the witty insincerity of the society in which he lives, and his poetry is soiled by the contact. It is not destroyed, not even changed in its nature, but its gold is left for ever twisted in a baser metal with which it does not suit. What we get is not a new compound with the element that corresponds to poetic energy transmuted, but an ill-sorted mixture, while Keats gives us the unblemished gold. We are right in proclaiming his the finer achievement.

Keats and Wither will serve as examples with which to finish our argument. In spite of all that has been said Keats takes higher rank as poet than Wither? Yes, certainly, but not because the poetic energy in him was a finer thing than the poetic energy that was in Wither. It was more constant, which is a fact of no little importance; its temper appealed to a much more general sympathy, a circumstance which cannot be left out of the reckoning; it touched a far wider range of significant material. These things give Keats his just superiority of rank, but they do not deprive Wither, at his best moments, of the essential quality which is with Keats, as with all poets, the one by which he makes his proudest claim good. Nor need it be feared that in allowing Wither, with his rare moments of withdrawn and rather pale perfection, this the highest of all distinctions, we are making accession to the title of poet too easy. It remains the most difficult of all human attainments. The difference between the essential quality in those eight fragile lines and that in such verse as, say:

Oft. In the stilly night, Ere slumber's chain has bound me, Fond memory brings the light Of other days around me,

may be so elusive as to deceive many people that it does not exist, but it is the difference between the rarest of all energies and a common enough sensibility.

LYRIC FORMS

While, therefore, the term "lyric poetry" would in itself seem to be tautological, and so to speak of lyric forms is, strictly, to speak of all poetic forms, there are nevertheless certain more or less defined characteristics of form that we usually connect in our mind with what we call "a lyric" (or, even less exactly, "lyric poetry") which may be said to be a poem where the pure poetic energy is not notably associated with other energies--with a partial exception to which reference will be made. In examining these characteristics nothing will be attempted in the way of a history or an inclusive consideration of particular forms which are known as lyric, but only, as far as may be, an analysis of their governing principles.

To say that a lyric (using the word henceforward in its particular sense) is generally short is but to say that poetic tension can only be sustained for a short time. Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just. What happens, I think, is this. The poetic mood, selecting a subject, records its perception of that subject, the result is a lyric, and the mood passes. On its recurrence another subject is selected and the process repeated. But if another energy than the purely poetic, the energy of co-ordination of which I have spoken, comes into operation, there will be a desire in the poet to link the records of his recurrent poetic perceptions together, and so to construct many poems into a connected whole. Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them. The decision that the material used at one occurrence of the poetic mood shall be related to the material used at the next is not in itself an operation of the purely poetic energy, but of another.

The present purpose is, however, to consider the general character of forms used by poets when they choose to leave each successive record of poetic experience in isolation. I have said that any translation of emotion into poetry--it might be said, into any intelligible expression--necessarily implies a certain co-operation of intellectual control. If we take even a detached phrase so directly and obviously emotional in source as:

I die, I faint, I fail!

it is clear that the setting out those words is not merely an emotional act. But intellectual control of this kind is not identical with that intellectual relating of one part to another of which we have been speaking, which we may call co-ordination. Of all energies, however, the co-ordinating energy is the one with which the poetic energy is most instinctively in sympathy, and it is in this connection that I made a partial exception when I said that a lyric was a poem where the pure poetic energy was not notably associated with other energies. When a poet writes a poem of corresponding lines and stanzas or in a form of which the structural outline is decided by a definable law--as in the sonnet--he is in effect obeying the impulse of the co-ordinating energy, and the use of rhyme is another sign of obedience to the same impulse. It so happens that this energy, next to the poetic energy, is the most impressive and satisfying of all mental activities, and while poetry may exist independently of it, the fact remains that it very rarely does so. A very curious fallacy about this matter has sometimes obtained support. The adherents of what is called free verse, not content, as they should thankfully be, if they can achieve poetry in their chosen medium, are sometimes tempted to claim that it is the peculiar virtue of their manner--which, let me say it again, may be entirely admirable--that it enables the structure of verse to keep in constant correspondence with change of emotion. The notion is, of course, a very convenient one when you wish to escape the very exacting conditions of formal control, and have not the patience or capacity to understand their difficulties, and that it is professed by many who do so wish is doubtless. But there are other serious and gifted people, loyally trying to serve a great art, who hold this view, and on their account consideration is due to it. But it is none the less a fallacy, and doubly so. In the first place, the change of line-lengths and rhythms in a short poem written in "free verse" is nearly always arbitrary, and does not succeed in doing what is claimed for it in this direction, while it often does succeed in distressing the ear and so obscuring the sense, though that is by the way. It is not as though given rhythms and line-lengths had any peculiar emotional significance attached to them. A dirge may be in racing anapaests, laughter in the most sedate iambic measure; a solemn invocation may move in rapid three-foot lines, while grave heroic verse may contain the gayest of humours. In a long work, indeed, variety of structure may be used to give variety of sensation to the ear with delightful and sometimes even necessary effect, though--in English, and I am always speaking of English--it cannot even then be used with any certainty to express change of emotion. But in a lyric the ear does not demand this kind of relief. With many of us, at least, it accepts and even demands an unbroken external symmetry. The symmetry may be externally simple, as in, say, the stanzas of _Heraclitus_:

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead; They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed. I wept as I remembered how often you and I Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest, A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest, Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales awake, For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take,

or intricate, as in: