"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."