INTRODUCTION LYRIC POETRY The Golden Treasury has for half a century been the accepted collection of the best English verse, for the period it covers, from the age of Elizabeth to about 1830. The selections were made by a poet, Francis Turner Palgrave, with the advice of one of the greatest modern poets, Alfred Tennyson.1 What lyric poetry is, and what it means to a man of poetic appreciation, can best be seen by reading Palgrave's own Preface (p. 29). As we turn over the leaves of the book, we see that the subjects of poetry are as varied as life itself; we find poems on war and patriotism, on birth and death, on flowers, trees, and streams, on the sea and the sky; poems on friendship and on love in all degrees, youthful romance, lovers parted or forsaken, love in marriage and in old age; poems of compliment, of humor, of regret, of aspiration. It is not the subject that makes the poem, but what the poet sees in it, beyond the vision of the rest of us. Shakespeare's banished duke found "Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, and Wordsworth said "To me the meanest flower that blows can give This power of seeing beyond the superficial fact to some more important and significant truth is what we mean by the poetic imagination. By this power of imagination the poet summons up whatever comparisons will throw the essential quality of 1 See introduction by Edward Hutton to the Booklovers' Library edition of The Golden Treasury. we pass over almost without notice the suggestion of the night being a real creature with a "face," and seize upon the wonderful thought of the clouds on a starry night being for Keats so full of romantic visions, of which his poems were merely shadows, that he would never be able to write them all. A comparison, whether metaphor or simile, may run on to some length, as in Waller's "Go, lovely Rose" (p. 150) or Drum~ mond's "Of this fair volume which we World do name" (p. 99). In such cases, the poet may greatly strengthen his effect, by the aptness with which the two ideas continue to parallel each other; there is danger, however, that we may think more of his cleverness and ingenuity than the importance of his thought. Another frequently used figure is personification, by which objects of nature, or mere abstractions of qualities, are spoken of as if they had life and personality. The first line in the book personifies Spring, as "the year's pleasant king." Shakespeare speaks of "that churl, Death," and "Captive Good attending Captain III"; Milton, of "Laughter, holding both his sides." It is fatally easy to slip into the habit of merely spelling abstract nouns with capitals, without imagining them transformed into persons at all; "printer's-devil personification," as it has been called. Gray is sometimes guilty of this, as in the lines (p. 275): "Where grateful Science still adores In true personification, the thing personified really appears to live. Shelley's "Night" (p. 320) is besought to "Wrap thy form in a mantle gray, Star-inwrought: Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day," and later we hear of his "brother Death," and his "sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed." Another poetic device, not exactly a figure of speech, but allied to them, is the pretty pretense known as the pastoral. In poems of this kind, everyone is thought of as a shepherd, in a sort of den age of simplicity; with nothing to do but sit in the shade watching the sheep, playing on rustic instruments of music, singing songs, or making love. This convention goes back to ancient Greek times, when people who had become tired of artificial city life turned with delight to the fresh shepherd poems of Theocritus, from the mountains of Sicily. The modern pastoral is usually sheer artifice: we don't need to be told that Marlowe's Passionate Shepherd (p. 38) is no English sheep-tender, when he offers his love "Fair linèd slippers for the cold With buckles of the purest gold," as well as silver dishes on an ivory table. Milton (p. 120) speaks of his dead friend as Lycidas, a shepherd, when we very well know his real name was Edward King, and he was a college student preparing for the ministry. Artificial as the pastoral seems at first, we come to recognize it as a graceful and often a beautiful device, specially fit for somewhat formal poems of compliment, of regret, or of bereavement. The pastoral is sometimes hard to distinguish from the poem really descriptive of country life; the two shade into each other. A further characteristic of poetic thought is the ability of poets to put some universal human observation or ideal into such a striking phrase as to satisfy the race that it is the one best and permanent expression for that thought. So we get our so-called "quotations," the lines everybody knows, without perhaps knowing where they come from; such as "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen." (Gray, p. 259) 46 "I could not love Thee, dear, so much Loved I not honour more.' (Lovelace, p. 146) We carved not a line and we raised not a stone, But we left him alone with his glory." (Wolfe, p. 357) "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." (Keats, p. 473) "old, unhappy far-off things And battles long ago." (Wordsworth, p. 412) What has been said so far applies, in the main, to all poetry. A lyric poem is distinguished from all other kinds by being short, THE GOLDEN TREASURY SELECTED FROM THE BEST SONGS AND LYRICAL ARRANGED WITH NOTES BY FRANCIS T. PALGRAVE LATE PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND FURTHER C⋅EM⋅ NEW YORK CHARLES E. MERRILL COMPANY |