A Companion to Romantic Poetry

Charles Mahoney

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781444390643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Through a series of 34 essays by leading and emerging scholars, A Companion to Romantic Poetry reveals the rich diversity of Romantic poetry and shows why it continues to hold such a vital and indispensable place in the history of English literature.

• Breaking free from the boundaries of the traditionally-studied authors, the collection takes a revitalized approach to the field and brings together some of the most exciting work being done at the present time
• Emphasizes poetic form and technique rather than a biographical approach
• Features essays on production and distribution and the different schools and movements of Romantic Poetry
• Introduces contemporary contexts and perspectives, as well as the issues and debates that continue to drive scholarship in the field
• Presents the most comprehensive and compelling collection of essays on British Romantic poetry currently available

Part I

Forms and Genres

1

Mournful Ditties and Merry Measures: Feeling and Form in the Romantic Short Lyric and Song

Michael O’Neill

Short poems can condense all things into themselves, drops of dew that fold in on themselves but mirror the cosmos. Brief in one sense, they are immense in others, making one little stanzaic room an everywhere. Keats’s hauntingly tuned “In drear nighted December,” with its dancing, troubled lilt, contrasts nature’s indifference to its changes with the human experience of loss. The poem trips, in both senses of the word, as it concludes by pointing out how “The feel of not to feel it, / When there is none to heal it, / Nor numbèd sense to steel it, / Was never said in rhyme” (ll. 21–4). The passage moves fleetly, but, as it turns from song to speech in the last line, a line that catches up the close of the previous two stanzas in its rhyming wake, it mimes the effect of slowing, even half-stumbling. The poem’s end suggests the huge tracts of human experience never caught in “rhyme” and hints at its own success in netting a strange, uncomfortable sensation, the “feel of not to feel it,” when “passèd joy” (l. 20) is re-experienced like a phantom limb.

Keats’s poem shows how Romantic brief lyrics turn into metapoetry (poetry about poetry) with startling rapidity. The short lyric is poetry at its most exposed; each short lyric performs an implicit work of poetics, bearing out a poet’s essential idea of poetry, and this is partly because it must “sing,” or at least be “A Sort of a Song,” to borrow the title of a poem by William Carlos Williams. Brief lyric and song, my two concerns, blend and intermingle as subgenres: “lyric,” for my purposes, draws attention to the expression of feeling, “song” to the imperatives of the rhythmic movement of words, a movement rooted in traditional airs and measures.

The long, withdrawing roar of historicist and ideologically theorized reaction against aestheticism in its varied shapes and guises has meant a relative indifference to the gift of song which Romantic poetry extends to its readers. At times one may feel that the loss is ours; and one does not have to be a follower of Theodor Adorno, with his view that, through its very autonomy, art might offer a revealing “negative” image of social and political realities, to see that supposedly “pure lyric,” in obeying its own formal laws, has much to say about a very impure bundle of realities. In the hands of Romantic practitioners, the short lyric and song represent a major generic breakthrough. If the Romantic short lyric and song draw on the eighteenth-century revival of ballad and minstrelsy, they imbue their forms with a new personal note, even as they encourage the personal to communicate with the impersonal (often embodied in the form of poetry). The chapter argues that, in their dramatization of the relationship between form and feeling, the Romantic short lyric and song explore their own cultural purpose and value.

I

My title comes from a poem by Shelley, entitled, like so many ventures in the lyric mode, “Song,” and, like many of Shelley’s briefer pieces, it uses its lyricism to lament an absence, but it does so in such a way that it converts absence into musical presence. From its beginning, “Rarely, rarely comest thou, / Spirit of Delight!” (ll. 1–2), a trochaic lilt moves in sympathy with the coming and going of the “Spirit of Delight,” whose visitations are “rare,” in the dual sense of being very infrequent and being valuable. In “Song,” Shelley expressly shapes lyric into a dimension which “may be / Untainted by man’s misery” (ll. 35–6), yet the “taint” of “man’s misery” refuses to be eradicated. It reappears in the poet’s own refusal to sentimentalize: “Let me set my mournful ditty / To a merry measure. / Thou wilt never come for pity – / Thou wilt come for pleasure” (ll.19–22). The poem notes the disjunction between form and content, even as the “merry measure” bears witness to Shelley’s refusal simply to intone “mournful” commonplaces. Lyric art heightens, so the lines suggest, our awareness of the “mournful” by bringing into play awareness of art as always art, always obedient to rules governing “measure.”

In fact, Shelley’s lyric self-positioning, as in “To a Skylark,” is relatively intricate. In that poem the trill of the clever stanzaic form, its long last alexandrine floating and running “Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun” (l. 15), imitates the poet’s admiration for the skylark’s world of “clear keen joyance” (l. 76); at the same time, Shelley recognizes his distance from such a world. “Our sweetest songs,” as he notes reflexively, “are those that tell of saddest thought” (l. 90), and “saddest thought” discovers its nature most profoundly and finds “sweetest” expression when contemplating its opposite. “Song,” too, both surrenders to and offers a critique of pure lyric, if one identifies such a thing with the “Spirit of Delight,” a Spirit sought after with a restrained, disciplined longing that is affecting. It is as though the lyric poet’s fate were to devise beautiful forms that articulate his distance from the beauty they embody. The close of the poem composes a chastened music out of its sense of such a distance:

I love Love – though he has wings,
And like light can flee –
But above all other things,
Spirit, I love thee –
Thou art Love and Life! O come,
Make once more my heart thy home.

(ll. 43–8)

The metre here, as elsewhere in the poem, plays with and against the cadences of the speaking voice, which is allowed to assert itself in unostentatious ways at moments such as “though” (l. 43), “all” (l. 45), “love” (l. 46), and “my” in the last line. The emotion is one of longing, as is betokened by the final apostrophe. Yet “once more” in the final line indicates that the invoked Spirit has, in the past, made the poet’s “heart” its “home,” where the alliterative bond suggests, tantalizingly, the appropriateness of such a domiciling, just as the previous line has briefly married “Love and Life.”

Shelley’s “Song” suggests that many Romantic lyrics carry their burdens of significance lightly. Appropriately, my word “burdens” can have a musical meaning, too, and Romantic lyrics are frequently within calling distance of literal music. As often, they anticipate Verlaine’s nuanced injunction in his “Ars poétique” “De la musique avant toute chose” (Music above everything; Verlaine 1999): an injunction which allows for things, even as it sets music in a superior position to them. Byron wrote the poems in Hebrew Melodies to be set to music by Isaac Nathan; Shelley’s lyrics have often been set to music, too. Moore’s Irish Melodies provide a preeminent example of poems written to be sung, even if, in the words of one entranced listener, the American poet Nathaniel Parker Willis, Moore “makes no attempt at music” in his singing of his poems. Willis continues: “It is a kind of admirable recitative, in which every shade of thought is syllabled and dwelt upon, and the sentiment of the song goes through your blood, warming you to the very eyelids, and starting you to tears, if you have soul or sense in you” (Vail 2001: 85). Such a “recitative” serves as a means of reflecting on the purpose and role of poetic lyric, as Moore’s “Oh! Blame not the Bard” (1810) brings out. Participating in sophisticated ways in that recovery of the bard as impassioned champion and chronicler of a culture typical of the eighteenth-century revival of medieval minstrelsy, the poem’s galloping anapaests may lack the subtlety of rhythm and suggestion which Verlaine urges in “Art poétique”; they may even threaten to descend to the status of that “littérature” which is the final scornful word of Verlaine’s poem. But nuance re-enters via a syntax which hints at failed possibilities, so many sharp stones on which to cut one’s feet beneath the limpid flow of the rhythms. Indeed, the poem acts as a lament for what the lyric poet might have done with his art: were Ireland’s “spirit” not “broken” (l. 10), then

The string that now languishes loose o’er the lyre
Might have bent a proud bow to the warrior’s dart,
And the lip which now breathes but the song of desire
Might have poured the full tide of a patriot’s heart.
(ll. 5–8; quoted from Wordsworth and Wordsworth 2003)

The image of the lyre-string which have might strung a longbow suggests that the hand is mightier than the pen, but it is only the bardic effusion which makes possible “the song of desire”: a desire for the “mights” of patriotic engagement. And in its final stanza the poem throws off its veils of self-abasement and recovers its lyric nerve:

But though glory be gone, and though hope fade away.
Thy name, loved Erin, shall live in his songs:
Not e’en in the hour when his heart is most gay
Will he lose the remembrance of thee and his wrongs!

(ll. 25–8)

True, this sentiment might play into the hands of those who would see Moore as an ineffectually anglicized Irish bard, wailing tunefully and noncontroversially of his nation’s injuries. But the writing links lyric to processes of “remembrance” in ways that are complicated. The poem may be learned by heart, remembered as though a song of some long-distant historical event; yet its capacity to work on the conscience of Ireland’s rulers is suggested, too, a suggestion made overt at the end when Moore sings to “loved Erin” (l. 26) of a time when “thy masters themselves, as they rivet thy chains, / Shall pause at the song of thy captive and weep” (ll. 31–2). This complicated state of affective embroilment by both “masters” and “captive” in the pity induced by Ireland’s “wrongs” means that the word with which that noun rhymes, “songs,” draws powerful attention to itself. “Songs” point up “wrongs,” a rhyme that hints at Moore’s apologia for his career as a poet.

II

Romantic brief poems often reflect, implicitly or explicitly, on their own reasons for existence and mode of being, and do so through their musical intensity. Leigh Hunt praises Coleridge for writing poems “so perfect in the sentiment of music, so varied with it, and yet leaving on the ear so unbroken and single an effect,” and in doing so comes close to formulating an ad hoc Romantic poetics of the lyric. For him, Coleridge’s is a poetry “quietly content with its beauty”: furthermore, “Of pure poetry, strictly so called, that is to say, consisting of nothing but its essential self, without conventional and perishing helps, he was the greatest master of his time.” There are substantial objections to the idea of a “pure poetry,” just as there are to the notion of “music” in poetry. Rhythm, sound-effects: these cannot be isolated from semantic considerations. Yet we can grant the force of these objections, and still believe that Hunt has captured a quality without which poems such as Coleridge’s “Love” would make only half their impact on us. That quality is a sense in which the lyric mastery of the poet, consubstantial as it is with the poem, is also felt as a contributing and overriding presence. Hunt notes of “Love,” a poem of great narratorial sophistication, that “one of the charms of it consists in the numerous repetitions and revolvings of the words, one on the other, as if taking delight in their own beauty” (Hunt 1891: 251, 250, 259). Such “revolvings” slyly and affectingly link to the poem’s hints that its scenario serves as a mask for an unspoken autobiographical endeavor of the poet’s, one running parallel to the sophisticated self-awareness of the lyric. Mirrors start to mirror mirrors in a stanza such as this, singled out by Hunt: “I told her how he pined: and ah! / The deep, the low, the pleading tone / With which I sang another’s love, / Interpreted my own” (ll. 33–6). As the singer of a song, the “I” has stepped inside the lyric space; as the writer who draws attention to the singer who has so stepped, Coleridge invites us to suppose that we might interpret his own extra-poetic feelings.

Self-consciousness about lyric reaches an extravagant extreme in Edgar Allen Poe’s bravura post-Romantic manifesto, “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846). It is post-Romantic in that Poe has, it would seem, studied the effects of the best Romantic lyrics and sought to elicit from them a formula for the archetypal short, perfect poem. Poe has this to say:

What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones – that is to say, of brief poetical effects. … For this reason, at least, one half of the “Paradise Lost” is essentially prose – a succession of poetical excitements interspersed, inevitably, with corresponding depressions – the whole being deprived, through the extremeness of its length, of the vastly important artistic element, totality, or unity of effect. (Poe 1846: 164)

Poe may exaggerate. Yet he isolates a central feature of, and source of power in, Romantic poetry. Shelley, for all his grasp of Dante’s Commedia as an epic poem, anticipates Poe in his sense of the Italian poet’s work as burning with a many-faceted, highly localized brilliance: “His very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought” (Shelley 2003: 693). Is it not the case that Shelley’s famous or notorious difficulty connects closely with the jostling concourse, in poems such as the “Ode to the West Wind,” of many “burning atoms of inextinguishable thought”? Were figures of speech ever so vividly heaped, one upon another, as at that poem’s close, as we move from imagined “incantation” (l. 65) of the poem we are reading to “Ashes and sparks” (l. 67) “scattered” (see l. 66) as from “an unextinguished hearth” (l. 66), to the “trumpet of a prophecy” (l. 69)? Each word burns with its own connected, if atomized, minidrama; thus the command to “Scatter” (l. 66) imbues the verse with a sense of the poet’s authority so to command; in the same breath, it hints, too, at the notion of dispersal, even at an Orphic sacrificial ritual that links with the eruption into the second terza rima sonnet, by way of a simile, of “some fierce Maenad” (l. 21). The terza rima mimes, among other things, a continual interplay between concentration and scattering.

The idea of poetry struggling to aspire to the condition of a single word may have its origins in Christianity’s trust in the Logos. The poet of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto III, true to that canto’s shadowy, alternative life as an extended sequence of connected short lyrics, expresses the wish to wreak

My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak,
All that I would have sought, and all I seek,
Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe – into one word

(97, ll. 906–10)

The longing comes and goes, and defeats itself in the act of utterance. The trailing sentence speaks of conditionality, unassailability. Even details such as the repetition of “feel” after “feelings” tell us that the dream of encapsulating the self into “one word” cannot be realized. But many Romantic poems believe that brevity is the soul of poetic achievement, as the following very short poem bears witness:

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees,
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees.

Wordsworth’s enigmatic poem continues to haunt. Coleridge spoke of it as a “sublime Epitaph” and went on: “Whether it had any reality, I cannot say. Most probably, in some gloomier moments he had fancied the moment in which his sister might die” (Wu 2006: 478). Coleridge poses a possibility, that of the lines having “any reality,” that the poem outlaws and prompts. Its lyric autonomy seems absolute. Yet its urgency shocks us into the wish to find a biographical key. Even in his glissade to “the moment in which his sister might die” after “in some gloomier moments he had fancied,” Coleridge slides from lyric to life in a way that suggests the power of the fiction is to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Halftitle Page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Charles Mahoney
• Part I Forms and Genres
• Part II Production and Distribution, Schools and Movements
• Part III Contemporary Contexts and Perspectives
• Part IV Critical Issues and Current Debates
• Index