The Elizabethan lyric - 1903 Author:John Erskine Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: But the subject — the intellectual message — of both poems, is the poet's love. The law of unity is as natural and inexorable in lyric emotion as it is in dra... more »matic action. The lyric stimulus sets the tone or quality of the emotion, and controls it till the end. For example, to refer again to Keats, the Ode on the Grecian Urn takes its classic reserve, its plastic quality, from the stimulus it so continually contemplates; or, to state it differently, by keeping the reader's eye fixed upon the urn, the poet makes him feel the emotional value of the poem in terms of plastic quality. On the same principle, though with a different manner, Shelley's Ode to the West Wind reproduces the emotional effect of the wind, which it keeps present before our thought. If the original stimulus does not so control and sustain the emotion, the lyric either breaks down entirely, or else separates into fragments, each a complete lyric unit in itself. This last condition is well seen in Jonson's lines to Celia: — " Drink to me only with thine eyes." The two stanzas have the same subject, — a courtly profession of love, —but each has its own emotional stimulus, and is a song by itself. The poet's message would be rendered by either stanza alone, or with their order reversed. The obvious inference from this law of emotional continuity is that, where the lyric stimulusis an idea, or an intellectual proposition, the lyric is likely to take on a strongly meditative or philosophical character. With a large intellectual element in such poems, it is not surprising that though they often have verbal sweetness, they rarely show spontaneous song-quality. They are classed as lyrics, not in the musical sense of the Greeks, but on account of their direct expression, the "subjectivity" taken as a standard b...« less