[bear_music]

I'd be interested in seeing people post their nominations for the "greatest lyric poem" (metrical, of course) in the English language.

Here's one I think ranks way up there. Extended metaphor polished to perfection.

To Marguerite

Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.

But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour –

Oh! then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain –
Oh, might our marges meet again!

Who ordered, that their longing's fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled?
Who renders vain their deep desire? –
A god, a god their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.

— Matthew Arnold




[This message has been edited by bear_music (edited January 18, 2002).]

[graywyvern]

silly question--but silly questions are sometimes worth
answering...

(better than this is to compile your own personal
anthology--in this age of instant xerox books that's
almost effortless, & it will teach you better than any
number of lit courses--)

used to say reflexively "Lycidas" but i dunno...haven't felt
a great craving to read it in an awful long while. there's
"Hasbrouck and the Rose" by Phelps Putnam, a wonderful mystico-
erotic poem that transcends its own cynicism. or i could opt
for perfection, & go with one of Plath's middle period or
any one of two dozen Housman poems or...

today i say: Campion's "When thou must home to shades of
underground".

[bear_music]

It may be a "silly question", but I am genuinely curious to see people's nominations for lyrical benchmarks, ideally with the poem itself posted in here. I get a pretty clear picture of what certain regular posters like and dislike about our humble submissions to this forum. Now I'd like to see what they consider flawless and enduring.

We'll see if there's any interest in that.

(music)

[bear_music]

Posted for Graywyvern:

When Thou Must Home

When thou must home to shades of underground,
And there arrived, a new admiréd guest,
The beauteous spirits do engirt thee round,
White Iope, blithe Helen, and the rest,
To hear the stories of thy finished love
From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move,

Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights,
Of masques and revels which sweet youth did make,
Of tourneys and great challenges of knights,
And all these triumphs for thy beauty's sake;
When thou hast told these honors done to thee,
Then tell, Oh tell, how thou didst murther me.

— Thomas Campion

[A. E. Stallings]

Well, that is casting a wide net! Greatest lyric poem in English? I fear I'm with Gray on this one--if not a silly question, a too-broad question. If you narrowed it to FAVORITE lyric poem in English, maybe... Or defined greatness somehow. Almost all of the poems we talk about here are lyric. Hmmm. (Though what defines "lyric" poetry could easily be a separate discussion.)

Are you suggesting (though I don't think you really are) the Matthew Arnold poem posted is the "greatest" lyric poem in English? It is quite a nice poem indeed, but more me even his own "Dover Beach" is further up there.

And then "flawless" I think is probably a sterile virtue.

For instance, my favorite couplet of all, I think, (and we've had that discussion before somewheres) is from the Shakespeare ditty, "Fear No More the Heat o' the Sun", a true "lyric" poem, in that it was to be sung:

Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Absolutely my favorite.

But the poem is not really flawless--it rather falls off a bit from the brilliant first verse.

I'm with Gray on a dozen or so Housman poems, which would definitely be in my top one hundred ("Loveliest of Trees", "When I was One and Twenty", "To an Athlete Dying Young," etc.) "A Shropshire Lad" as a whole.

And there are some favorite poems, that seem to me "perfect", by which I do not mean without flaw, (again, I would argue, a sterile virtue.) But by which I mean complete, filled full, realized.

As this Ransom poem (which has been discussed before on these pages, I think):

Bell's for John Whiteside's Daughter

There was such speed in her little body,
And such lightness in her footfal,
It is no wonder her brown study
Astonishes us all.

Her wars were bruited in our high window.
We looked among orchard trees and beyond
Where she took arms against her shadow,
Or harried unto the pond

The lazy geese, like a snow cloud
Dripping their snow on the green grass,
Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud,
Who cried in goose, Alas,

For the tireless heart within the little
Lady with rod that made them rise
From their noon apple-dreams and scuttle
Goose-fashion under the skies!

But now go the bells, and we are ready,
In one house we are sternly stopped
To say we are vexed at her brown study,
Lying so primly propped.


Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" would be up there for me... As would Hardy's "Darkling Thrush," Marvell's "To a Coy Mistress"... Keat's "Ode on a Grecian Urn,"., etc.

This ditty by Byron seems perfect in its small, plain-spoken way:

So We'll Go No More A-Roving

So we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And Love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.


Bear, it's question we cannot begin to answer, I'm afraid!

[MarcusBales]

Not only "greatest" needs definition before anything like consensus can be arrived at, but "lyric", too -- so in the interests of extending that notion, I'll note that Swinburne didn't have a lot to say, but he had one thing, and once he said it supremely well.

A Forsaken Garden
AC Swinburne

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.

The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,
To the low last edge of the long lone land.
If a step should sound or a word be spoken,
Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest's hand?
So long have the grey bare walks lain guestless,
Through branches and briars if a man make way,
He shall find no life but the sea-wind's, restless
Night and day.

The dense hard passage is blind and stifled
That crawls by a track none turn to climb
To the strait waste place that the years have rifled
Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time.
The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;
The rocks are left when he wastes the plain.
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,
These remain.

Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not;
As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry;
From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,
Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.
Over the meadows that blossom and wither
Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song;
Only the sun and the rain come hither
All year long.

The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels
One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath.
Only the wind here hovers and revels
In a round where life seems barren as death.
Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,
Haply, of lovers none ever will know,
Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping
Years ago.

Heart handfast in heart as they stood, "Look thither,"
Did he whisper? "look forth from the flowers to the sea;
For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither,
And men that love lightly may die--but we?"
And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,
And for ever the garden's last petals were shed,
In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,
Love was dead.

Or they loved their life through, and then went whither?
And were one to the end--but what end who knows?
Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither,
As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose.
Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them?
What love was ever as deep as a grave?
They are loveless now as the grass above them
Or the wave.

All are at one now, roses and lovers,
Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea.
Not a breath of the time that has been hovers
In the air now soft with a summer to be.
Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter
Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep,
When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter
We shall sleep.

Here death may deal not again for ever;
Here change may come not till all change end.
From the graves they have made they shall rise up never,
Who have left nought living to ravage and rend.
Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing,
While the sun and the rain live, these shall be;
Till a last wind's breath upon all these blowing
Roll the sea.

Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,
Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.

[MacArthur]

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day

I WAKE and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Gerald Manley Hopkins

I don't even like this guy, normally. Isn't that the way, though?
I'm told the poem was a favorite of Aldous Huxley.

[bear_music]

Well, it's obvious that the term "greatest" is undefined in this context, it's an open-ended question in that sense. And certainly, if this started an argument over this poem's or that poem's ranking, so to speak, that would be silly.

But as a simple, even naive, little exercise, it seems to me to have virtue. Already I am seeing some interesting responses.

Incidentally, I said "Extended metaphor polished to perfection." In her reply, Alicia says "And there are some favorite poems, that seem to me "perfect", by which I do not mean without flaw, (again, I would argue, a sterile virtue.) But by which I mean complete, filled full, realized."

That's exactly what I meant. I didn't mean to imply that my exemplar was flawless (and if it were, it would indeed be sterile, most likely), but that the "extended metaphor" itself is polished to perfection.

(music)

AH! I see where that came from. In my second post to this thread, I referred to what is "flawless and enduring". I cast that off without thinking it through. A thing need not be flawless to endure, and flawlessness in and of itself is no poetic virtue. Alicia is quite correct.

[This message has been edited by bear_music (edited January 19, 2002).]

[Robert J. Clawson]

Alicia's Ransom and Marvell are favorites and I would have posted "Bells for..." had she not. Here's one by Robert Herrick that should settle the "flawless" question.

Delight in Disorder

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction:
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthralls the crimson stomacher;
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly:
A winning wave (deserving note)
In the tempestuous petticoat:
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.


Bob

[MarcusBales]

Here's one that looks flawless to me:

The Silken Tent
Robert Frost

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one’s going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.