“This lyre-derived heritage survives robustly in the lyrics of pop songs, guitars now taking the place of the lyre and the orality of the human voice singing taking precedence over all.”
Aristotle’s Poetics divides poetry into three main categories: epic, dramatic, and lyric. While approximate, that division roughly still holds today. Beowulf is an epic. King Lear is a drama in verse. Most of the poetry of William Butler Yeats, such as “Byzantium” is lyric. Compared to the first two, lyric tends to be short. A sonnet, for example, has only fourteen lines. Beowulf has 3,182. The Iliad has 15,693. Epic and dramatic poetry is seldom written in modern times, having largely been replaced by narrative forms such as the novel, though one can cite poetic examples such as Derek Walcott’s Omeros, which, not coincidentally, is modeled on the most famous and enduring Western verse epic, Homer’s The Odyssey. Nevertheless, for the past two centuries, most poetry written in English has become lyric, to the extent that we now just call it “poetry” without thinking, and it is widely understood what is meant by that. But that does not mean lyric poetry itself is a recent phenomenon.
The origins of Western lyric poetry, like so much of our culture, lie in ancient Greece. Sappho, often called the tenth muse, was writing lyric poetry such as elegies, epigrams, odes, and love ballads, around 600 B.C.
Ornate-throned immortal Aphrodite, wile-weaving
daughter of Zeus, I entreat you: do not overpower my
heart, mistress, with ache and anguish
but come here, if ever in the past you heard my voice
from afar and acquiesced and came, leaving your
father’s golden house.
This poem consists of seven three-line stanzas. That is all she needs to accomplish what she wants.
The overall mode is called lyric because its examples were composed to be accompanied by a stringed lyre and sung. Voice matters greatly to these creations. This lyre-derived heritage survives robustly in the lyrics of pop songs, guitars now taking the place of the lyre and the orality of the human voice singing taking precedence over all. The opening of Paul Simon’s song “Graceland” is a classic example:
The Mississippi DeltaWas shining like a national guitarI am following the riverDown the highwayThrough the cradle of the Civil War
In this song, Simon quickly establishes the first-person experience of a man on an Odyssean quest of self-discovery. Yet the entire experience happens in four minutes and 48 seconds. Like Sappho, Simon presents a self that we identify as a sensitive seeker of experience who is filled with unrequited longing and a thirst for knowledge. In Simon’s case, he makes his song immediately expansive, large-feeling, by comparing the characteristic shape of a geographical river delta to the fanciful image of a “national guitar.” There is your lyre. Then, he evokes history, which might suggest epic magnitude, but the performance still has to come down in less than five minutes.
Another contemporary, Delta-based song comes immediately to mind; Marc Cohn’s “Walking in Memphis”:
Put on my blue suede shoes
And I boarded the plane
Touched down in the land of the Delta Blues
In the middle of the pouring rain
W.C. Handy, won’t you look down over me?
Yeah, I got a first class ticket
But I’m as blue as a boy can be
Then I’m walking in Memphis
Was walking with my feet ten feet off of Beale
Walking in Memphis
But do I really feel the way I feel?
As in many traditional lyric poems, Cohn favors three and four line stanzas, also known as tercets and quatrains. He playfully evokes Elvis, as does Simon in “Graceland.” This title, and the mood of the lyrics, portray a man in search of a spiritual reawakening and finding it via gospel and other popular music.
These two composers happen to be gifted at creating both memorable words and music. Many song lyricists write ordinary and even banal lyrics and get away with it because the music carries the song more than the words.
However, modern lyric poetry, stripped of literal music, must provide the equivalent of actual music through rhyme and meter. That is one of the reasons why so-called traditional verse still gets written. If one strips away rhyme and meter, it can be tough to create lyric writing that comes off as more than ordinary speech broken into lines. Free verse, while an important modernist development, cannot simply dispense with what we call prosody, which is the patterning of poetry through rhythm and sound.
That is why the English Romantic poets are still a great source of inspiration and reading pleasure. A poet such as John Keats offers an intense, compressed, and rapturous experience in his sonnets. His “I,” which we commonly refer to as “the speaker,” but often assume is a version of the poet himself or herself, puts into precise language a concise series of images and observations that use the elements of prosody to heighten whatever phenomenon he or she is observing. The beauty of the sonnet in large part rests on rhyme and meter, enjambment, consonance, assonance, caesuras and so forth. Keats’s poem “Bright Star” is an ideal example of what a lyric poem can accomplish in the short space of fourteen lines.
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
A prose summary of the poem is hey, star, I wish I were as constant as you. I do not mean all by yourself way up there alone at night, looking over the landscape like a hermit, while rivers and oceans wash the whole earth clean, or else looking down on the snow covering mountains and plains. But me, I am constant, a lot like you, with my head laid on my love’s sighing breast, just listening to it rise and fall, her asleep, me awake and restless. I could spend the rest of my life attending to that sound, which would make me feel eternal, unless instead I fainted and died.
My prose summary loses the entire charm of Keats’s poem. That is where the word “prosaic” comes from. In my retelling, it sounds like the breathy but flatfooted and somewhat boring diary entry of a lovesick and not very poetic teenager. It sounds like how the characters talk to each other in the movie Twilight, as if they were not particularly smart, just full of confused romantic feelings.
By contrast, we understand “Bright Star” precisely as we hear it, sound by sound, pulse by pulse, line by line. The use of meter and rhyme is largely unobtrusive because the poem knows how to carry us along by ear, much like those popular songs by Cohn and Simon. “Bright Star” swings. It gives us imagery to hold onto. It is not trying too hard to say something. It is more about the how than about the what.
And like those poems, it knows how to manage the “I.” The first person here is tender, quiet, observant, yet there is an underlying thrill, a rapture in progress. The first two lines are littered with s’s and t’s. Those consonant sounds are like concord grapes hanging in a bunch or blueberries clustered on a bush. They are succulent, and we want to eat them. In fact, those s’s and t’s cascade through the entire poem: steadfast, aloft, sleepless, priestlike task, breast, sweet unrest, still, swoon.
This soundscape is vertical, reinforcing the distance between the star up on high and the observer on earth far below. This short poem manages, in part through its theme, to feel expansive, vast. At the same time, it is close and intimate, with the poet’s head tucked against his love’s breast as she sleeps. As he imagines the moon watching over immense seas, he is safely ensconced in an intimate space. The soft-fallen mask of snow on the mountains in the first half is paralleled by the soft fall and swell of the lover’s breast. Two separate but related worlds are in simultaneous, subtle motion.
The philosopher John Stuart Mill made the important observation that the “I” in lyric poetry is a voice overheard. It is the equivalent of someone talking out loud as he or she sits alone in a room, Mill writes: “Eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude.”
This necessity of the overheard “I,” however, is not a license to write self-involved poetry as you did when you were fourteen years old and had no point of reference except yourself. That is the problem with the false lure of so-called free verse, with its emphasis on self-expression at all costs, writing it as you feel it without any formal criteria. While Rupi Kaur’s effusions—I dare not call them poetry—reach millions through social media, they represent nothing more than self-exalting pathos and pseudo-profundity. Her so-called poem “the irony of loneliness/is we all feel it/at the same time” is essentially a refrigerator magnet or meme. The banally explanatory obviousness of what it is saying is only superseded by the fact that it has no formal properties worthy of notice. It is just a statement broken into lines. There is no music. It could not profitably be set to a lyre in ancient Greece, or a guitar now. Therefore, it is not an example of lyric. It takes all the license of the “I” to summon our attention, and then does nothing with that attention. If you are going to shout to the world, “look at me,” at least have outside frames of reference ready for when we do look. Sappho was smart enough to address her personal lament to the goddess Aphrodite.
Keats, too, creates an outside reference point by personifying the bright star and using direct address to speak to it. It is his holy “thou.” The lover also serves as an equally important reference, an earthly expression of a divine principle. Keats speaks equally about the world—the mountains and the moors, the waterways—and himself. “Bright Star,” like all the best lyric poetry, is more about perception and less about explaining thoughts and opinions. We got to lyric poetry to have an experience, and the poet-speaker of the poem, the “I,” ought to be a reliable guide, not simply drowning us in his or her ego and feelings.
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s justly famous “Ode to the West Wind” begins with similar orchestrated drama, via the use of apostrophe, e.g., direct address, to the titular wind, just as Keats addresses the star and Sappho speaks directly to Aphrodite.
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing
We are caught immediately within his spell of ecstasy, overhearing his excitement, as he builds through an ingenious sequence of five terza rima sonnets to plead with the wind to endow him with the gift of poetry. The final sonnet begins thus:
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
This is the literal definition of lyric poetry, given that Shelley begs the wind to make him, Shelley, into its lyre. He sees himself as a vehicle to express and channel the wind’s unbridled strength through his strings into “mighty harmonies.” Let us wish the same for ourselves.
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.
