The everyday language we use to communicate ideas is largely invisible. That is, we pay little attention to such language for its own sake and more for the ideas or messages it contains—just as we are more interested in the contents of a package than in the packaging.
Literary language, on the other hand, is most interesting not for what it says, but rather how it says. This is particularly true of poetry, and especially lyric poetry. Poems draw our attention to their material being: the sounds they make as they are spoken aloud—rhyme, forms of repetition, musical elegance, and other sonic effects—and the striking images they seem to paint for the mind’s eye. Note that this description of the psychological phenomenon of imagery relies itself on a vivid image (mind painting), demonstrating that the most ordinary kinds of expression are often saturated with metaphor. No, there is no artist inside our heads painting pictures. But neither is there any such thing as a literal sunrise or sunset. Language’s fundamental debt to the non-literal is doubly true of poetry, a mode of communication in which metaphor and the aural dynamics of speech are most intensely concentrated. Poetry, in other words, makes language both sing and appear. Poems are wordy things made up of thingy words.
The term lyric referred originally to music sung to the accompaniment of a lyre, from a Greek word (lyra) meaning a small stringed instrument that musicologists call a “yoke lute.” By extension, the term lyrical is frequently applied to any form of linguistic utterance that has musical qualities. Any poetical work, then, might be called a lyric in this sense. Indeed, the word poem derives from a Greek verb, ποιέω (or poieó), meaning “to make.” A poem in this sense is simply any “made thing”—reminding us, again, of the artisanal and craft-like qualities of poetic construction.
In literary studies, lyric usually refers to non-narrative poems. Unlike an epic poem—say, Beowulf—or plays written in verse, lyrics concentrate less on the temporal unfolding of events and actions than on reflection and description. They drill down into the minutiae of material reality, states of mind, the dynamics of relationships, personality types; what it’s like to be a cat or a tree or an old man raging against the storm; or what stars have in common with eyes, eels with thoughts, trip-hop music with pad Thai, sex with religious devotion.
Students should spend considerable time reading and re-reading the poems in Alice Oswald’s Falling Awake. It is recommended too that as you study you keep open a window accessing the Oxford English Dictionary, provided for free to the NMU community. (If off campus, you will need to run the NMU-VPN client.) The discussion prompts include exercises designed to help you become familiar with poetic forms, and to identify ways in which formal features complement meaning.
In your discussion contributions, try not to think of lyric poems merely as art to be read, witnessed, or otherwise passively consumed; aim rather to think of these “wordy things made of thingy words” as objects to be played with. For lyric verse, perhaps more than any other literary form, discloses itself fully only in the presence of an audience attuned to its manifold possibilities. Which is a fancy way of saying, “Have fun!”
©Robert Whalen, 2025