The Lyric

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THE LYRIC

AN ESSAY BY JOHN DRINKWATER

1922

CONTENTS

What is Poetry

The Best Words in the Best Order

The Degrees of Poetry

Paradise Lost

What is Lyric

The Classification of Poetry

Lyric Forms

Song

The Popularity of Lyric

Conclusion

WHAT IS POETRY?

If you were to ask twenty intelligent people, "What is the Thames?" the
answer due to you from each would be--"a river." And yet this would hardly
be matter to satisfy your enquiring mind. You would more probably say,
"What do you know of the Thames?" or, "Describe the Thames to me." This
would bring you a great variety of opinions, many dissertations on
geological and national history, many words in praise of beauty, many
personal confessions. Here would be the revelation of many minds
approaching a great subject in as many manners, confirming and
contradicting each other, making on the whole some impression of cumulative
judgment, giving you many clues to what might be called the truth, no one
of them by itself coming near to anything like full knowledge, and the
final word would inevitably be left unsaid.

The question, "What is poetry?" has been answered innumerable times, often
by the subtlest and clearest minds, and as many times has it been answered
differently. The answer in itself now makes a large and distinguished
literature to which, full as it is of keen intelligence and even of
constructive vision, we can return with unstaling pleasure. The very poets
themselves, it is true, lending their wits to the debate, have left the
answer incomplete, as it must--not in the least unhappily--always remain.
And yet, if we consider the matter for a moment, we find that all this
wisdom, prospering from Sidney's _Apology_ until to-day, does not
strictly attempt to answer the question that is put. It does not tell us
singly what poetry is, but it speculates upon the cause and effect of
poetry. It enquires into the impulse that moves the poet to creation and
describes, as far as individual limitations will allow, the way in which
the poet's work impresses the world. When Wordsworth says "poetry is the
breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," he is, exactly, in one intuitive
word, telling us how poetry comes into being, directing us with an inspired
gesture to its source, and not strictly telling us what it is; and so
Shelley tells us in his fiery eloquence of the divine functions of poetry.
But poetry is, in its naked being and apart from its cause and effect, a
certain use of words, and, remembering this simple fact, there has been
one perfect and final answer to the question, "What is poetry?" It was
Coleridge's: "Poetry--the best words in the best order."

THE BEST WORDS IN THE BEST ORDER

This is the fundamental thing to be remembered when considering the art of
poetry as such. The whole question of what causes a poet to say this or
that and of the impression that is thence made upon us can be definitely
narrowed down to the question "How does he say it?" The manner of his
utterance is, indeed, the sole evidence before us. To know anything of
a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know
something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly
inessential. The written word is everything. If it is an imperfect word, no
external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry. We may at times,
knowing of honourable and inspiriting things in a poet's life, read into
his imperfect word a value that it does not possess. When we do this our
judgment of poetry is inert; we are not getting pleasure from his work
because it is poetry, but for quite other reasons. It may be a quite
wholesome pleasure, but it is not the high æsthetic pleasure which the
people who experience it generally believe to be the richest and most vivid
of all pleasures because it is experienced by a mental state that is more
eager and masterful than any other. Nor is our judgment acute when we
praise a poet's work because it chimes with unexpected precision to some
particular belief or experience of our own or because it directs us by
suggestion to something dear to our personal affections. Again the poet is
giving us delight, but not the delight of poetry. We have to consider this
alone--the poet has something to say: does he say it in the best words in
the best order? By that, and by that alone, is he to be judged.

For it is to be remembered that this achievement of the best words in the
best order is, perhaps, the rarest to which man can reach, implying as it
does a coincidence of unfettered imaginative ecstasy with superb mental
poise. The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience;
what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way,
that is, completely. He has felt it with an imaginative urgency so great as
to quicken his brain to this flawless ordering of the best words, and it
is that ordering and that alone which communicates to us the ecstasy, and
gives us the supreme delight of poetry. It should here be added that poetry
habitually takes the form of verse. It is, perhaps, profitless to attempt
any analysis of the emotional law that directs this choice, nor need it
arbitrarily be said that poetry must of necessity be verse. But it is a
fact, sufficiently founded on experience, that the intensity of vision that
demands and achieves nothing less than the best words in the best order for
its expression does instinctively select the definitely patterned rhythm
of verse as being the most apt for its purpose. We find, then, that the
condition of poetry as defined by Coleridge implies exactly what the
trained judgment holds poetry to be. It implies the highest attainable
intensity of vision, which, by the sanction of almost universal example,
casts its best ordering of the best words into the form of verse. Ruskin
wrote, with fine spiritual ardour--

"... women of England! ...do not think your daughters can be trained to the
truth of their own human beauty, while the pleasant places, which God
made at once for their schoolroom and their playground, lie desolate and
defiled. You cannot baptize them rightly in those inch-deep founts of
yours, unless you baptize them also in the sweet waters which the great
Lawgiver strikes forth for ever from the rocks of your native land--waters
which a Pagan would have worshipped in their purity, and you worship only
with pollution. You cannot lead your children faithfully to those narrow
axe-hewn church altars of yours, while the dark azure altars in heaven--the
mountains that sustain your island throne--mountains on which a Pagan would
have seen the powers of heaven rest in every wreathed cloud--remain for you
without inscription; altars built, not to, but by an unknown God."

Here we have, we may say, words in their best order--Coleridge's equally
admirable definition of prose. It is splendid prose, won only from great
nobility of emotion. But it is not poetry, not the best words in the best
order announcing that the feeling expressed has been experienced with the
highest intensity possible to the mind of man. The tenderness for earth and
its people and the heroic determination not to watch their defilement in
silence, have been deeply significant things to Ruskin, moving him to
excellent words. But could they be more strictly experienced, yet more
deeply significant, shaping yet more excellent words? Blake gives us the
answer:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

It may be suggested that, for their purpose, Ruskin's words are perfectly
chosen, that as a direct social charge they achieve their purpose better
than any others that could have been shaped. Even if we allow this and
do not press, as we very reasonably might, the reply that merely in this
direction Blake's poem working, as is the manner of all great art, with
tremendous but secret vigour upon the imagination of the people, has a
deeper and more permanent effect than Ruskin's prose, we still remember
that the sole purpose of poetry is to produce the virile spiritual
activity that we call æsthetic delight and that to do this is the highest
achievement to which the faculties of man can attain. If by "the best
words" we mean anything, we must mean the best words for the highest
possible purpose. To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic
government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely
fulfills the highest function of a government--the realisation of the will
of the people. But it is also a function of government to organise the
people and--although, just as we may think that Blake's poem finally
beats Ruskin's prose on Ruskin's own ground, we may think, too, that the
government that best represents the people will finally best organise
the people--it may quite plausibly be said that in this business an
aristocratic or militant government will, in an imperfectly conditioned
civilisation (such as that of the world to-day), excel a democratic
government. Nevertheless, we still say with an easy mind that a democratic
government is the best government, without qualification, since it excels
in the highest purpose of government. Clearly Coleridge implies, and
reasonably enough, an elaboration such as this in his definition--the best
words in the best order. To say that Blake and Ruskin, in those passages,
were giving expression to dissimilar experiences is but to emphasise the
distinction between prose and poetry. The closest analysis discovers no
difference between the essential thought of the one and the other. But
Blake projected the thought through a mood of higher intensity, and, where
Ruskin perfectly ordered admirable words, he perfectly ordered the
best words. It is the controlling mood that differs, not the material
controlled. Hence it is that still another mind, starting from the same
radical perception, might transfigure it through a mood as urgent as
Blake's and produce yet another poem of which it could strictly be said
that here again were the best words in the best order. We should then
have three men moved by the same thought; in the one case the imaginative
shaping of the thought would fail to reach the point at which the record
and communication of ecstasy become the chief intention, and the expression
would be prose; in each of the other cases the shaping would pass beyond
that point, and there would be two separate moods expressed, each in the
terms of poetry.

One further qualification remains to be made. By words we must mean, as
Coleridge must have meant, words used for a purpose which they alone can
serve. Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences
that can be communicated in no other way. If you ask me the time, and I
say--it is six o'clock, it may be said that I am using the best words in
the best order, and that, although the thought in my mind is incapable of
being refined into the higher æsthetic experience of which we have spoken,
my answer is, if Coleridge was right, poetry. But these are not, in our
present sense, words at all. They have no power which is peculiar to
themselves. If I show you my watch you are answered just as effectively.

That there is no absolute standard for reference does not matter. All
æsthetic appreciation and opinion can but depend upon our judgment,
fortified by knowledge of what is, by cumulative consent, the best that has
been done. There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best
words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and
judgment, that it is so. And the conviction is, exactly, the conviction
that the mood to which the matter has been subjected has been of such a
kind as to achieve an intensity beyond which we cannot conceive the mind as
passing, and it follows that there may be--as indeed there are--many poems
dealing with the same subject each of which fulfills the obligations of
poetry as defined by Coleridge. For while the subjects of poetry are few
and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is
the same in all arts. If six masters paint the same landscape and under
the same conditions, there will be one subject but six visions, and
consequently six different interpretations, each one of which may, given
the mastery, satisfy us as being perfect; perfect, that is, not as the
expression of a subject which has no independent artistic existence, but as
the expression of the mood in which the subject is realised. So it is in
poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having
been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do
this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant
verse.

THE DEGREES OF POETRY

The question that necessarily follows these reflections is--Are there
degrees in poetry? Since a short lyric may completely satisfy the
requirements of poetry as here set down, announcing itself to have been
created in a poetic or supremely intensified mood, can poetry be said at
any time to go beyond this? If we accept these conclusions, can a thing so
slight, yet so exquisite, so obviously authentic in source as:

When I a verse shall make,
Know I have pray'd thee,
For old religion's sake,
Saint Ben, to aid me.

Make the way smooth for me,
When I, thy Herrick,
Honouring thee, on my knee
Offer my lyric.

Candles I'll give to thee,
And a new altar,
And thou, Saint Ben, shall be
Writ in my Psalter,

be said to be less definitely poetry than _Paradise Lost_ or in any
essentially poetic way below it? The logical answer is, no; and I think it
is the right one. In considering it we should come to an understanding of
the nature of lyric, the purpose of this essay. But first let us see how
far it may be justifiable.

PARADISE LOST

It is commonly asserted and accepted that _Paradise Lost_ is among the
two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of
supreme poetic achievement in our literature. What are the qualities by
virtue of which this claim is made, and allowed by every competent judge?
Firstly there is the witness of that ecstasy of mood of which we have
spoken.

His praise, ye Winds, that from four quarters blow,
Breathe soft or loud: and wave your tops, ye Pines,
With every plant, in sign of worship wave.
Fountains, and ye that warble, as ye flow,
Melodious murmurs, warbling tune his praise.
Join voices all ye living Souls. Ye Birds,
That, singing, up to Heaven-gate ascend,
Bear on your wings and in your notes his praise.
Ye that in waters glide, and ye that walk
The earth, and stately tread, or lowly creep,
Witness if I be silent, morn or even,
To hill or valley, fountain, or fresh shade,
Made vocal by my song, and taught his praise.

This note of high imaginative tension is persistent throughout the poem,
and that it should be so masterfully sustained is in itself cause for
delighted admiration. But to be constant in a virtue is not to enhance
its quality. Superbly furnished as _Paradise Lost_ is with this
imaginative beauty, the beauty is as rich and unquestionable in the few
pages of _Lycidas_; there is less of it, that is all. And who shall
say that it is less ecstatic or less perfect in the little orison to Saint
Ben? You may prefer Milton's manner, but then you may, with equal reason,
prefer Herrick's, being grateful for what Keats announced to be truth, in
whatever shape you may find it. In any case we cannot, on this ground,
assign a lower place to the poet who could order those words "religion's,"
"Saint Ben," "Psalter" and the rest of them, with such inspired good
fortune. And yet we know that _Paradise Lost_ is a greater work than
this little flight of certain song, greater, too, than the poet's own
elegy. There is an explanation.

Of all the energies of man, that which I will anticipate my argument by
calling the poetic energy, the energy that created Herrick's song and the
distinguishing qualities of that passage from Milton, is the rarest and the
most highly, if not the most generally, honoured; we have only to think of
the handful of men who at any time out of all the millions can bring this
perfect expression to a mood of the highest imaginative intensity, to know
that the honour is justly bestowed. So splendid a thing is success in
this matter that failure, if it is matched with a will for sincerity and
intelligence of purpose, will often bring a man some durable fame. But the
energies of man are manifold, and while we rightly set the poetic energy
above the rest, there are others which are only less rare, and in their
most notable manifestations yielding to it alone in worthiness of homage
which will, indeed, often be more generally paid. Such an energy is the
profound intellectual control of material, as distinct from profound
emotional sensitiveness to material; the capacity for ordering great masses
of detail into a whole of finely balanced and duly related proportions.
Cæsar and Napoleon had it, marshalling great armies to perfectly conceived
designs; Fielding had it, using it to draw a multitude of character and
event into the superbly shaped lines of his story; the greatest political
leaders have had it; Cromwell had it, organising an enthusiasm; Elizabeth,
organising a national adventure.[1] Again, there is the energy
of morality, ardently desiring justice and right fellowship, sublimely
lived by men who have made goodness great, like Lincoln, sublimely spoken
by men who made sermons passionate, like Ruskin and Carlyle. To take one
other instance, there is the highly specialised energy that delights in the
objective perception of differentiations of character, the chief energy of
the deftest wits such as Samuel Johnson and the best comic dramatists.

[1: It may be necessary to point out that while the poetic energy
does not include this architectural power, the intellectual co-ordination
of large masses of material, it does, of course, include the shapely
control of the emotion which is its being. It is, indeed, difficult to see
precisely what can be meant by the suggestion that is often made that the
emotions can ever be translated into poetic form wholly without the play of
intellect. If the emotion is intense enough for the creation of poetry at
all, it will inevitably call up the intellectual power necessary to its
shaping, otherwise it would be ineffectually diffused. Mr. John Bailey, in
his masterly if sometimes provoking essay on Milton says, in the midst
of some admirable remarks on this subject, "It has been said by a living
writer that 'when reason is subsidiary to emotion verse is the right means
of expression, and, when emotion to reason, prose.' This is roughly true,
though the poetry of mere emotion is poor stuff." I would suggest that
poetry of emotion, in this sense, does not and could not exist. Bad verse
is merely the evidence of both emotion and intellect that are, so to
speak, below poetic power, not of emotion divorced from intellect, which
evaporates unrecorded.]

Any one of these energies, greatly manifested, will compel a just
admiration; not so great an admiration as the poetic energy, which is
witness of the highest urgency of individual life, of all things the most
admirable, but still great. If, further, we consider any one of these
energies by itself, we shall see that if it were co-existent with the
poetic energy, the result would be likely to be that, in contact with
so masterful a force, it would become yet more emphatic, and so a thing
arresting in itself would become yet more notable under its new dominion.
And so it is. Fielding's architectural power is a yet more wonderful thing
in Sophocles, where it is allied to poetic energy; Ruskin's moral fervour
is, for all its nobility, less memorable than Wordsworth's and Ben Jonson
defines character more pungently than Sheridan. These energies remain,
nevertheless, distinct from the poetic energy. When, however, a poet is
endowed not alone with his own particular gift of poetry, but also with
some of these other energies--of which there are many--his work very
rightly is allowed an added greatness. It is so with _Paradise Lost_.
Of the three energies other than the poetic that I have mentioned, Milton
had rich measure of two and something of the third. No man has ever
excelled him either in power of intellectual control or in moral passion,
and he was not without some sense of character. Consequently we get in
his great poem, not only the dominating poetic quality which is the chief
thing, enabling the poet to realise his vision (or mood) perfectly, but
also the spectacle of a great number of perfectly realised visions being
related to each other with excellent harmony; we get, further, a great
moral exaltation--again perfectly realised by the poetic energy, and we
get, finally, considerable subtlety--far more than is generally allowed--of
psychological detail. From all these things, the architectonics, the zeal
for justice and the revelation of character, we get an added and wholesome
delight which gives Milton's work a place of definitely greater eminence
than Herrick's song in the record of human activity. In effect, Milton
besides being a poet, which is the greatest of all distinctions, becomes,
by possession of those other qualities, a great man as well, and I think
that this is really what we mean when we speak of a great poet. Without his
poetic faculty, although he would fall in the scale of human distinction,
which is not at all the same thing as renown, below, say, so humble a
personality yet so true a poet as John Clare[2], Milton would still be a
great man, while Herrick without his poetry would be indistinguishable from
the crowd. And the great man is as clearly evident in Milton's poetry as he
is clearly not evident in Herrick's.

[2: It may be asked: "Do you really think that a poet who has left
no other record of himself than a page or two of songs, even perfect songs,
can claim a greater distinction than a great man who is not a poet?" Let me
say, once for all, that I do think so. To have written one perfect song
is to have given witness and the only kind of witness (in common with the
media of other arts) that is finally authoritative, that at least one
supremely exacting mood has been perfectly realised; that is to say, one
moment of life has been perfectly experienced. And since, with our human
conception, we can see no good or desirable end beyond the perfect
experience of life, the man who proves to us that he has done this, no
matter though it has been but for a moment, is more distinguished--that is,
more definitely set apart in his own achievement--than the man who, with
whatever earnestness and nobility, has but proved to us that he desired
this perfection of experience, even though the desire is exalted by the
most heroic altruism.]

WHAT IS LYRIC?

And so we have Milton and Herrick, both poets, the one a great man, the
other not. It is a wide difference. Great men are rare, poets are rarer,
but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest
of all events. Milton is one of perhaps a dozen names in the history of the
world's literature, Herrick--still with a fine enough distinction--one of
something under two hundred in the history of our own. And yet they are
left on equal terms in the possession of the purely poetic energy. Milton's
achievement outweighs Herrick's, but for the reasons that I have mentioned,
and not because poetry grows better by accumulation or because it is
possible to prove, or even to satisfy any considerable majority of good
judges, that--

Ye have been fresh and green,
Ye have been filled with flowers,
And ye the walks have been
Where maids have spent their hours.
You have beheld how they
With wicker arks did come
To kiss and bear away
The richer cowslips home.
You've heard them sweetly sing,
And seen them in a round:
Each virgin like a spring,
With honeysuckles crown'd.
But now we see none here
Whose silvery feet did tread,
And with dishevell'd hair
Adorn'd this smoother mead.
Like unthrifts, having spent
Your stock and needy grown,
You've left here to lament
Your poor estates, alone,

is inferior, in specifically poetic quality, to

Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,
For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor;
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.

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