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 short, makes language 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 word
meaning simply any “made thing.”)
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.
The British Renaissance (roughly 1485-1660) is characterized in
part by a remarkable flourishing of lyric and other poetic genres. It is no
exaggeration to say that this period witnessed the invention of English poetry, the
establishment of forms and techniques which, while based largely on classical-era
Greek and Roman models, were developed into a distinct tradition native to the
British Isles and of long-lasting influence. Among the most prominent of these
genres, examples of which we will study over the next several weeks, include the
following:
More details about these various genres are included in the discussion prompts. Our brief survey includes sonnets by Shakespeare, Wroth, and Donne; epigrams by Jonson; and country-house poems by Jonson and Lanyer. These readings are mostly short, but some of the poems are fairly dense. All are very rich in meaning, as well as formally complex and elegant.
Students should spend considerable time reading and re-reading these poems. 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!”