A Study of Poetry

by Bliss Perry

CHAPTER VIII

RELATIONSHIPS AND TYPES OF THE LYRIC

"Milk-Woman. What song was it, I pray? Was it 'Come, shepherds, deck
your heads'? or, 'As at noon Dulcina rested'? or, 'Phillida flouts me'?
or, 'Chevy Chase'? or, 'Johnny Armstrong'? or, 'Troy Town'?"
ISAAC WALTON, The Complete Angler

We have already considered, at the beginning of the previous chapter, the general relationship of the three chief types of poetry. Lyric, epic and drama, i.e. song, story and play, have obviously different functions to perform. They may indeed deal with a common fund of material. A given event, say the settlement of Virginia, or the episode of Pocahontas, provides situations and emotions which may take either lyric or narrative or dramatic shape. The mental habits and technical experience of the poet, or the prevalent literary fashions of his day, may determine which general type of poetry he will employ. There were born lyrists, like Greene in the Elizabethan period, who wrote plays because the public demanded drama, and there have been natural dramatists who were compelled, in a period when the theatre fell into disrepute, to give their material a narrative form. But we must also take into account the dominant mood or quality of certain poetic minds. Many passages in narrative and dramatic verse, for instance, while fulfilling their primary function of telling a story or throwing characters into action, are colored by what we have called the lyric quality, by that passionate, personal feeling whose natural mode of expression is in song. In Marlowe's Tamburlaine, for instance, or Victor Hugo's Hernani, there are superb pieces of lyric declamation, in which we feel that Marlowe and Hugo themselves—not the imaginary Tamburlaine and Hernani—are chanting the desires of their own hearts. Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustum," after finishing its tragic story of the son slain by the unwitting father, closes with a lyric description of the majestic Oxus stream flowing on to the Aral sea. Objective as it all seems, this close is intensely personal, permeated with the same tender stoicism which colors Arnold's "Dover Beach" and "A Summer Night." The device of using a Nature picture at the end of a narrative, to heighten, by harmony or contrast, the mood induced by the story itself, was freely utilized by Tennyson in his English Idylls, such as "Audley Court," "Edwin Morris," "Love and Duty," and "The Golden Year." It adds the last touch of poignancy to Robert Frost's "Death of the Hired Man." These descriptive passages, though lacking the song form, are as purely lyrical in their function as the songs in _The Princess _or the songs in The Winter's Tale.

1. The Blending of Types

While the scope of the present volume, as explained in the Preface, precludes any specific study of drama and epic, the reader must bear in mind that the three main types of poetry are not separated, in actual practice, by immovably hard and fast lines. Pigeonhole classifications of drama, epic and lyric types are highly convenient to the student for purposes of analysis. But the moment one reads a ballad like "Edward, Edward" (Oxford, No. 373) or "Helen of Kirconnell" (Oxford, No. 387) the pigeon-hole distinctions must be subordinated to the actual fact that these ballads are a blend of drama, story and song. The "form" is lyrical, the stuff is narrative, the mode of presentation is often that of purely dramatic dialogue.

Take a contemporary illustration of this blending of types. Mr. Vachel Lindsay has told us the origins of his striking poem "The Congo." He was already in a "national-theme mood," he says, when he listened to a sermon about missionaries on the Congo River. The word "Congo" began to haunt him. "It echoed with the war-drums and cannibal yells of Africa." Then, for a list of colors for his palette, he had boyish memories of Stanley's Darkest Africa, and of the dances of the Dahomey Amazons at the World's Fair in Chicago. He had seen the anti-negro riots in Springfield, Illinois. He had gone through a score of negro-saloons—"barrel-houses"— on Eleventh Avenue, New York, and had "accumulated a jungle impression that remains with me yet." Above all, there was Conrad's Heart of Darkness. "I wanted to reiterate the word Congo—and the several refrains in a way that would echo stories like that. I wanted to suggest the terror, the reeking swamp-fever, the forest splendor, the black-lacquered loveliness, and above all the eternal fatality of Africa, that Conrad has written down with so sure a hand. I do not mean to say, now that I have done, that I recorded all these things in rhyme. But every time I rewrote 'The Congo' I reached toward them. I suppose I rewrote it fifty times in these two months, sometimes three times in one day."

It is not often that we get so veracious an account of the making of a poem, so clear a conception of the blending of sound-motives, color-motives, story-stuff, drama-stuff, personal emotion, into a single whole.

Nor is there any clear separation of types when we strive to look back to the primitive origins of these various forms of poetry. In the opinion of many scholars, the origins are to be traced to a common source in the dance. "Dances, as overwhelming evidence, ethnological and sociological, can prove, were the original stuff upon which dramatic, lyric and epic impulses wove a pattern that is traced in later narrative ballads mainly as incremental repetition. Separation of its elements, and evolution to higher forms, made the dance an independent art, with song, and then music, ancillary to the figures and the steps; song itself passed to lyric triumphs quite apart from choral voice and choral act; epic went its artistic way with nothing but rhythm as memorial of the dance, and the story instead of dramatic situation; drama retained the situation, the action, even the chorus and the dance, but submitted them to the shaping and informing power of individual genius." [Footnote: Gummere, The Popular Ballad, p. 106.] In another striking passage, Professor Gummere asks us to visualize "a throng of people without skill to read or write, without ability to project themselves into the future, or to compare themselves with the past, or even to range their experience with the experience of other communities, gathered in festal mood, and by loud song, perfect rhythm and energetic dance, expressing their feelings over an event of quite local origin, present appeal and common interest. Here, in point of evolution, is the human basis of poetry, the foundation courses of the pyramid."

2. Lyrical Element in Drama