A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

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

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 interrelations 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