A Study of Poetry

by Bliss Perry

We cannot here attempt to trace, even in outline, the course of this historic evolution of genres. But in contemporary types of both dramatic and narrative poetry, there may still be discovered the influence of lyric form and mood. We have already noted how the dramatist, for all of his supposed objectivity, cannot refrain from coloring certain persons and situations with the hues of his own fancy. Ibsen, for instance, injects his irony, his love for symbolism, his theories for the reconstruction of society, into the very blood and bone of his characters and into the structure of his plots. So it is with Shaw, with Synge, with Hauptmann, with Brieux. Even if their plays are written in prose, these men are still "makers," and the prose play may be as highly subjective in mood, as definitely individual in phrasing, as full of atmosphere, as if it were composed in verse.

But the lyric possibilities of the drama are more easily realized if we turn from the prose play to the play in verse, and particularly to those Elizabethan dramas which are not only poetical in essence, but which utilize actual songs for their dramatic value. No less than thirty-six of Shakspere's plays contain stage-directions for music, and his marvelous command of song-words is universally recognized. The English stage had made use of songs, in fact, ever since the liturgical drama of the Middle Ages. But Shakspere's unrivalled knowledge of stage-craft, as well as his own instinct for harmonizing lyrical with theatrical effects, enabled him to surpass all of his contemporaries in the art of using songs to bring actors on and off the stage, to anticipate following action, to characterize personages, to heighten climaxes, and to express motions beyond the reach of spoken words. [Footnote: These points are fully discussed in J. Robert Moore's Harvard dissertation (unpublished) on The Songs in the English Drama.] The popularity of such song-forms as the "madrigal," which was sung without musical accompaniment, made it easy for the public stage to cater to the prevalent taste. The "children of the Chapel" or "of Paul's," who served as actors in the early Elizabethan dramas, were trained choristers, and songs were a part of their stock in trade. Songs for sheer entertainment, common enough upon the stage when Shakspere began to write, turned in his hands into exquisite instruments of character revelation and of dramatic passion, until they became, on the lips of an Ophelia or a Desdemona, the most touching and poignant moments of the drama. "Music within" is a frequent stage direction in the later Elizabethan plays, and if one remembers the dramatic effectiveness of the Easter music, off-stage, in Goethe's Faust, or the horn in Hernani, one can understand how Wagner came to believe that a blending of music with poetry and action, as exhibited in his "music-dramas," was demanded by the ideal requirements of dramatic art. Wagner's theory and practice need not be rehearsed here. It is sufficient for our purpose to recall the indisputable fact that in some of the greatest plays ever written, lyric forms have contributed richly and directly to the total dramatic effect.

3. The Dramatic Monologue

There is still another genre of poetry, however, where the inter-relations of drama, of narrative, and of lyric mood are peculiarly interesting. It is the dramatic monologue. The range of expressiveness allowed by this type of poetry was adequately shown by Browning and Tennyson, and recent poets like Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost and Amy Lowell have employed it with consummate skill. The dramatic monologue is a dynamic revelation of a soul in action, not a mere static bit of character study. It chooses some representative and specific occasion,—let us say a man's death-bed view of his career, as in "The Bishop orders his Tomb" or the first "Northern Farmer." It is something more than a soliloquy overheard. There is a listener, who, though without a speaking part, plays a very real role in the dialogue. For the dramatic monologue is in essence a dialogue of which we hear only the chief speaker's part, as in "My Last Duchess," or in E. A. Robinson's "Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford." It is as if we were watching and listening to a man telephoning. Though we see and hear but one person, we are aware that the talk is shaped to a certain extent by the personality at the other end of the line. In Tennyson's "Rizpah," for example, the characteristics of the well-meaning, Bible-quoting parish visitor determine some of the finest lines in the old mother's response. In Browning's "Andrea del Sarto" the painter's wife, Lucrezia, says never a word, but she has a more intense physical presence in that poem than many of the dramatis personae of famous plays. Tennyson's "Ulysses" and "Sir Galahad" and "The Voyage of Maeldune" are splendid soliloquies and nothing more. The first "Locksley Hall" is likewise a soliloquy, but in the second "Locksley Hall" and "To-Morrow," where scraps of talk from the unseen interlocutor are caught up and repeated by the speaker in passionate rebuttal, we have true drama of the "confrontation" type. We see a whole soul in action.

Now this intense, dynamic fashion of revealing character through narrative talk—and it is commonly a whole life-story which is condensed within the few lines of a dramatic monologue—touches lyricism at two points. The first is the fact that many dramatic monologues use distinctively lyric measures. The six-stress anapestic line which Tennyson preferred for his later dramatic monologues like "Rizpah" is really a ballad measure, and is seen as such to its best advantage in "The Revenge." But in his monologues of the pure soliloquy type, like "St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad," the metre is brilliantly lyrical, and the lyric associations of the verse are carried over into the mood of the poem. And the other fact to be remembered is that the poignant self-analysis and self-betrayal of the dramatic monologue, its "egoism" and its ultimate and appalling sincerities, are a part of the very nature of the lyric impulse. These revealers of their souls may use the speaking, rather than the singing voice, but their tones have the deep, rich lyric intimacy.

4. Lyric and Narrative

In narrative poetry, no less than in drama, we must note the intrusion of the lyric mood, as well as the influence of lyric forms. Theoretically, narrative or "epic" poetry is based upon an objective experience. Something has happened, and the poet tells us about it. He has heard or read, or possibly taken part in, an event, and the event, rather than the poet's thought or feeling about it, is the core of the poem. But as soon as he begins to tell his tale, we find that he is apt to "set it out" with vivid description. He is obliged to paint a picture as well as to spin a yarn, and not even Homer and Virgil—"objective" as they are supposed to be—-can draw a picture without betraying something of their attitude and feeling towards their material. Like the messenger in Greek drama, their voices are shaken by what they have seen or heard. In the popular epic like the Nibelungen story, there is more objectivity than in the epic of art like Jerusalem Delivered or Paradise Lost. We do not know who put together in their present form such traditional tales as the Lay of the Nibelungs and Beowulf, and the personal element in the narrative is only obscurely felt, whereas Jerusalem Delivered is a constant revelation of Tasso, and the personality of Milton colors every line in Paradise Lost. When Matthew Arnold tells us that Homer is rapid, plain, simple and noble, he is depicting the characteristics of a poet as well as the impression made by the Iliad and the Odyssey. Those general traits of epic poetry which have been discussed ever since the Renaissance, like "breadth," and "unity" and the sustained "grand" style, turn ultimately upon the natural qualities of great story-tellers. They are not mere rhetorical abstractions.

The narrative poet sees man as accomplishing a deed, as a factor in an event. His primary business is to report action, not to philosophize or to dissect character or to paint landscape. Yet so sensitive is he to the environing circumstances of action, and so bent upon displaying the varieties of human motive and conduct, that he cannot help reflecting in his verse his own mental attitude toward the situations which he depicts. He may surround these situations, as we have seen, with all the beauties and pomps and terrors of the visible world. In relating "God's ways to man" he instinctively justifies or condemns. He cannot even tell a story exactly as it was told to him: he must alter it, be it ever so slightly, to make it fit his general conceptions of human nature and human fate. He gives credence to one witness and not to another. His imagination plays around the noble and base elements in his story until their original proportions are altered to suit his mind and purpose. Study the Tristram story, as told by Gottfried of Strassburg, by Malory, Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne and Wagner, and you will see how each teller betrays his own personality through these instinctive processes of transformation of his material. It is like the Roman murder story told so many times over in Browning's Ring and the Book: the main facts are conceded by each witness, and yet the inferences from the facts range from Heaven to Hell.

Browning is of course an extreme instance of this irruption of the poet's personality upon the stuff of his story. He cannot help lyricising and dramatizing his narrative material, any more than he can help making all his characters talk "Browningese." But Byron's tales in verse show the same subjective tendency. He was so little of a dramatist that all of his heroes, like Poe's, are images of himself. No matter what the raw material of his narrative poems may be, they become uniformly "Byronic" as he writes them down. And all this is "lyricism," however disguised. William Morris, almost alone among modern English poets, seemed to stand gravely aloof from the tales he told, as his master Chaucer stood smilingly aloof. Yet the "tone" of Chaucer is perceived somehow upon every page, in spite of his objectivity.

The whole history of medieval verse Romances, indeed, illustrates this lyrical tendency to rehandle inherited material. Tales of love, of enchantment, of adventure, could not be held down to prosaic fact. Whether they dealt with "matter of France," or "matter of Brittany," whether a brief "lai" or a complicated cycle of stories like those about Charlemagne or King Arthur, whether a merry "fabliau" or a beast-tale like "Reynard the Fox," all the Romances allow to the author a margin of mystery, an opportunity to weave his own web of brightly colored fancies. A specific event or legend was there, of course, as a nucleus for the story, but the sense of wonder, of strangeness in things, of individual delight in brocading new patterns upon old material, dominated over the sense of fact. "Time," said Shelley, "which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest them, augments that of poetry, and forever develops new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains…. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."