While we must recognize, then, that the meaning of the word "lyrical" has been broadened so as to imply, frequently, a quality of poetry rather than a mere form of poetry, let us go back for a moment to the original significance of the word. Derived from "lyre," it meant first a song written for musical accompaniment, say an ode of Pindar; then a poem whose form suggests this original musical accompaniment; then, more loosely, a poem which has the quality of music, and finally, purely personal poetry. [Footnote: See the definitions in John Erskine's Elizabethan Lyric, E. B. Heed's English Lyrical Poetry, Ernest Rhys's Lyric Poetry, F. E. Schelling's The English Lyric, John Drinkwater's The Lyric, C. E. Whitmore in Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass., December, 1918.] "All songs, all poems following classical lyric forms; all short poems expressing the writer's moods and feelings in rhythm that suggests music, are to be considered lyrics," says Professor Reed. "The lyric is concerned with the poet, his thoughts, his emotions, his moods, and his passions…. With the lyric subjective poetry begins," says Professor Schelling. "The characteristic of the lyric is that it is the product of the pure poetic energy unassociated with other energies," says Mr. Drinkwater. These are typical recent definitions. Francis T. Palgrave, in the Preface to the Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics, while omitting to stress the elements of musical quality and of personal emotion, gives a working rule for anthologists which has proved highly useful. He held the term "lyrical" "to imply that each poem shall turn on a single thought, feeling or situation." The critic Scherer also gave an admirable practical definition when he remarked that the lyric "reflects a situation or a desire." Keats's sonnet "On first looking into Chapman's Homer," Charles Kingsley's "Airlie Beacon" and Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!" (Oxford Book of Verse, Nos. 634, 739 and 743) are suggestive illustrations of Scherer's dictum.
3. General Characteristics
But the lyric, however it may be defined, has certain general characteristics which are indubitable. The lyric "vision," that is to say, the experience, thought, emotion which gives its peculiar quality to lyric verse, making it "simple, sensuous, passionate" beyond other species of poetry, is always marked by freshness, by egoism, and by genuineness.
To the lyric poet all must seem new; each sunrise "herrlich wie am ersten Tag." "Thou know'st 'tis common," says Hamlet's mother, speaking of his father's death, "Why seems it so particular with thee?" But to men of the lyrical temperament everything is "particular." Age does not alter their exquisite sense of the novelty of experience. Tennyson's lines on "Early Spring," written at seventy-four, Browning's "Never the Time and the Place" written at seventy-two, Goethe's love-lyrics written when he was eighty, have all the delicate bloom of adolescence. Sometimes this freshness seems due in part to the poet's early place in the development of his national literature: he has had, as it were, the first chance at his particular subject. There were countless springs, of course, before a nameless poet, about 1250, wrote one of the first English lyrics for which we have a contemporary musical score:
"Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu."
But the words thrill the reader, even now, as he hears in fancy that cuckoo's song,
"Breaking the silence of the seas
Beyond the farthest Hebrides."
Or, the lyric poet may have the luck to write at a period when settled, stilted forms of poetical expression are suddenly done away with. Perhaps he may have helped in the emancipation, like Wordsworth and Coleridge in the English Romantic Revival, or Victor Hugo in the France of 1830. The new sense of the poetic possibilities of language reacts upon the imaginative vision itself. Free verse, in our own time, has profited by this rejuvenation of the poetic vocabulary, by new phrases and cadences to match new moods. Sometimes an unwonted philosophical insight makes all things new to the poet who possesses it. Thus Emerson's vision of the "Eternal Unity," or Browning's conception of Immortality, afford the very stuff out of which poetry may be wrought. Every new experience, in short, like falling in love, like having a child, like getting "converted," [Footnote: See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.] gives the lyric poet this rapturous sense of living in a world hitherto unrealized. The old truisms of the race become suddenly "particular" to him. "As for man, his days are as grass. As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth." That was first a "lyric cry" out of the depths of some fresh individual experience. It has become stale through repetition, but many a man, listening to those words read at the burial of a friend, has seemed, in his passionate sense of loss, to hear them for the first time.
Egoism is another mark of the lyric poet. "Of every poet of this class," remarks Watts-Dunton, "it may be said that his mind to him 'a kingdom is,' and that the smaller the poet the bigger to him is that kingdom." He celebrates himself. Contemporary lyrists have left no variety of physical sensation unnoted: they tell us precisely how they feel and look when they take their morning tub. Far from avoiding that "pathetic fallacy" which Ruskin analysed in a famous chapter, [Footnote: Modern Painters, vol. 3, chap. 12.] and which attributes to the external world qualities which belong only to the mind itself, they revel in it. "Day, like our souls, is fiercely dark," sang Elliott, the Corn-Law Rhymer. Hamlet, it will be remembered, could be lyrical enough upon occasion, but he retained the power of distinguishing between things as they actually were and things as they appeared to him in his weakness and his melancholy. "This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!… And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?"
Nevertheless this lyric egoism has certain moods in which the individual identifies himself with his family or tribe: