One of the most charming passages in Stedman's Nature and Elements of Poetry (pp. 181-85) deals with the law of Evanescence. The "flowers that fade," the "airs that die," "the snows of yester-year," have in their very frailty and mortality a haunting lyric value. Don Marquis has written a poem about this exquisite appeal of the transient, calling it "The Paradox":
"'T is evanescence that endures;
The loveliness that dies the soonest has the longest life."
But we touch here a source of lyric beauty too delicate to be analysed in prose. It is better to read "Rose Aylmer," or to remember what Duke Orsino says in Twelfth Night:
"Enough; no more:
'T is not so sweet now as it was before."
7. Expression and Impulse
A word must be added, nevertheless, about lyric expression as related to the lyric impulse. No one pretends that there is such a thing as a set lyric pattern.
"There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right."
No two professional golfers, for instance, take precisely the same stance. Each man's stance is the expression, the result, of his peculiar physical organization and his muscular habits. There are as many "styles" as there are players, and yet each player strives for "style," i.e. economy and precision and grace of muscular effort, and each will assert that the chief thing is to "keep your eye on the ball" and "follow through." "And every single one of them is right."
Apply this analogy to the organization of a lyric poem. Its material, as we have seen, is infinitely varied. It expresses all conceivable "states of soul." Is it possible, therefore, to lay down any general formula for it, something corresponding to the golfer's "keep your eye on the ball" and "follow through"? John Erskine, in his book on The Elizabethan Lyric, ventures upon this precept: "Lyric emotion, in order to express itself intelligibly, must first reproduce the cause of its existence. If the poet will go into ecstasies over a Grecian urn, to justify himself he must first show us the urn." Admitted. Can one go farther? Mr. Erskine attempts it, in a highly suggestive analysis: "Speaking broadly, all successful lyrics have three parts. In the first the emotional stimulus is given—the object, the situation, or the thought from which the song arises. In the second part the emotion is developed to its utmost capacity, until as it begins to flag the intellectual element reasserts itself. In the third part the emotion is finally resolved into a thought, a mental resolution, or an attribute." [Footnote: The Elizabethan Lyric, p. 17.] Let the reader choose at random a dozen lyrics from the Golden Treasury, and see how far this orderly arrangement of the thought-stuff of the lyric is approximated in practice. My own impression is that the critic postulates more of an "intellectual element" than the average English song will supply. But at least here is a clear-cut statement of what one may look for in a lyric. It shows how the lyric impulse tends to mould lyric expression into certain lines of order.
Most of the narrower precepts governing lyric form follow from the general principles already discussed. The lyric vocabulary, every one admits, should not seem studied or consciously ornate, for that breaks the law of spontaneity. It may indeed be highly finished, the more highly in proportion to its brevity, but the clever word-juggling of such prestidigitators as Poe and Verlaine is perilous. Figurative language must spring only from living, figurative thought, otherwise the lyric falls into verbal conceits, frigidity, conventionality. Stanzaic law must follow emotional law, just as Kreisler's accompanist must keep time with Kreisler. All the rich devices of rhyme and tone-color must heighten and not cloy the singing quality. But why lengthen this list of truisms? The combination of genuine lyric emotion with expertness of technical expression is in reality very rare. Goethe's "Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh" and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" are miracles of art, yet one was scribbled in a moment, and the other dreamed in an opium slumber. The lyric is the commonest, and yet, in its perfection, the rarest type of poetry; the earliest, and yet the most modern; the simplest, and yet in its laws of emotional association, perhaps the most complex; and it is all these because it expresses, more intimately than other types of verse, the personality of the poet.