The English Lyric 33 



" O sweet babe, and thou wert mine, 

 I wad dead thee in the silk so fine." 



" O mother dear, when I was thine, 

 Ye did na prove to me sae kind." 



And in this ballad the irrelevant refrain throwing an echo of 

 nature into the human tragedy and the sweetness of " ye'll smile 

 me dead" are Celtic; the denouement and the keen irony are 

 Saxon. The best qualities of each of the primitive poetries are 

 present : delicacy together with significant repression, nature- 

 sympathy with moral sternness, a diction of expressive melody, 

 yet austerely direct ; — and all a foretelling of the perfected lyric. 



VI. THE TURN INTO METAPHOR 



All forms of poetry interact upon one another and by subtle 

 gradation pass into one another, so that the development of each 

 is accompanied by coordinate modification of the others, some 

 one form, best adapted to the poetic insight of an era, dominat- 

 ing and molding what others persist along with it. 



Customarily we conceive the Elizabethan period as the period 

 of paramount drama; but it may fairly be questioned if the real 

 sovereignty belonged not to lyric passion. Certainly the drama 

 of that age is glorified with song as is no other modern drama, 

 while the more intimate poets' poetry — bloom of garden solitudes 

 — shows less tendency to bow to dramatic mastery than even 

 Victorian lyricism. Likely the music-fire of old England — not 

 yet snuffed out by Puritanism — had much to do with preserving 

 unalloyed the joyous melody of Elizabethan song; but I think, 

 if the conceit be not too fanciful, that in that lyric sweetness we 

 hearken rather the swan-song of a dying music-poetry. The full 

 flush of the great era brought English genius to the parting of 

 the ways : thereafter must be chosen wholly musical or wholly 

 poetical embodiment, — the word must divorce the singing for the 

 sake of more sublimate harmonies, the note must wing free from 

 the word for the fluting of airier melodies. The poetic fruition 

 was chosen, and the seal of the choice is found in accentuation of 



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