I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.[1]
As poetry, these verses in themselves have not quite the lyric impetus. They move to a stately music suited to the calm elevation of mind, in which "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" is now "recollected in tranquillity." They describe, however, rather than illustrate, the lyric temper. They are still charged with emotion which heightens and intensifies the actual material stuff out of which they are woven, and so they are true poetry. But the burden of thought tends to impede that upward spring of feeling which is the essence of the lyric mood.
The range of lyric poetry is limited only by the capacities of the human spirit; it is coextensive with the height and depth of man's mind and heart. A lyric is some one poet's interpretation of the beauty, the wonder, the profound mystery, of life as he perceives and feels it, by the magic of word-image made visible to the inward eye, by the weaving of tone and measured beat made vocal in the soul. In swift, vivid phrase it may picture a butterfly or a world; in richly-freighted word it may seem, for an illumined moment, to unlock the vast secret of life, discovering truth. The lyric may be an iridescent jet of song, piercing the silence; it may be a mighty hymn, resolving discords and voicing the praise of things. No mood is denied it; joy and sorrow, hope and regret, tears and laughter, lie within its compass. Its characteristic note is intense personality. But the true poet transfigures the beauty he has seen in his little
- ↑ Wordsworth. H. C., xli, 635ff.
