What is Lyric?
A lyric is a short verse that is very musical and expresses strong feelings. The poet can make the poem sound like a song by using rhyme, metre, and other literary devices. Lyric poetry, on the other hand, doesn’t have to tell a story like narrative poetry does. A lyric poem is a private way for one person to show how they feel. For example, the American poet Emily Dickinson wrote a lyric poem that starts, “I felt a funeral in my brain, / And mourners to and fro.” This poem describes how she felt inside.
Key Points of Lyric Poetry
I.) A lyric poem is an individual speaker’s private expression of feeling in the form of a poem.
Ii) Lyric poetry is characterised by its strong musicality and its ability to include poetic elements such as rhyme and metre.
Iii) There are three categories that some academics use to divide lyric poetry into: the lyric of vision, the lyric of thought, and the lyric of emotion. However, this classification is not generally recognised.
Origins of Lyric Poetry
Lyric poems are often where song lyrics start out. Lyric poetry was often paired with music played on a U-shaped stringed instrument called a lyre in ancient Greece. Great lyric poets like Sappho used words and music to show how much they loved and wanted someone. In other parts of the world, people came up with similar ways to write poetry. Between the fourth century B.C. and the first century A.D., Hebrew poets started writing personal, lyrical psalms that were sung in ancient Jewish worship services and collected in the Hebrew Bible. In Ancient Greece, the lyric was first used in a song that was usually played on the lyre. It was split into two types: choral lyric, which was sung by a chorus, and monoody, which was sung by one person (a solo). Most of the time, choral lyrics were sung in public at religious events, while monodies were sung in private settings. Their main ideas were as different as love, desire, pain, and patriotism. Some of the best-known Greek lyric poets are Sappho and Pindar.
Cornell University professor M. H. Abrams says that a lot of Romantic poets’ lyrics, especially the longer ones, are put together in a certain way. Abrams says in his essay “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric” that:
“[t]he speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation.”
The Romantic lyric
The Romantic lyric is far broader in scope in terms of subject matter, form, and language—possibly as a result of the lyric’s withdrawal from musical accompaniment and the Romantic emphasis on individualism. A single speaker—often the poet—speaks in a romantic lyric, conveying an emotion sparked by a specific person, object, or circumstance. The Romantic lyric is most easily recognised by:
• A heightened emotional state in which feelings are expressed in a passionate and personal way.
• A lot of imagery from nature.
Examples
One of the best-known lyrics from William Wordsworth’s poem Daffodils is “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” Wordsworth is thinking about how beautiful daffodils are and says that thinking about them will make him feel better when he is sad. In this lyric, as in others, Wordsworth employs everyday language to make his argument. Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats are some other well-known Romantic lyrists.
Romantic Lyric Poetry Features
• Treatment of the supernatural: The poets write about the supernatural in a way that makes it seem real and gives their writing a Gothic feel.
• Suspension of disbelief: This phrase tells us that Romantic poets force us to believe things that don’t make sense.
• Realism: The poets of the Romantic Age use a realistic style that is full of imagination. Not only did they write about real things, but they also wrote about them in a real way.
• Medievalism Is There: Medievalism is all over the Romantic poets’ works. The whole of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, for example, is full of the colour and glitz of the Middle Ages.
• Emotions Come First: Romantic poets told stories about their own lives to show how emotions can change how people see things. For example, Wordsworth’s poem “Prelude” shows how nature affects how a person grows.
Nature Imagery: Nature is their guide, friend, philosopher, nurse, playmate, mother, and everything else you can think of. She is both beautiful and harsh, scared and wise, a source of inspiration and fear for these writers. This is very clear in William Wordsworth’s Prelude.
Pantheism: Pantheism is the idea that everything is divine and that everything in reality is God.
• Spiritual Outlook: Nowhere do people talk about religion. Instead, they talk about spiritualism, which is a step up from religion.
• The poems are about the poet’s own life; this is a fact. They show who they are as individuals and have their own opinions.
• Enchanting Melody: The tone and style of Romantic Lyrics make them sound like music. The melody has the power to draw you in.
• Reflection: Most romantic lyrics have elements of reflection because they are full of vivid and spontaneous ideas.
• The Magic of Perfect Speech and the Power of Personal Passion
• Immortal Picture Gallery: The song’s romantic lyrics make an immortal picture gallery.
• Word-painting is one of the most important parts of a romantic lyric.
• Despondent View of Life: Often, the lyrics of romantic songs paint a picture of a person who is sad about life.