The English Lyric 37 



Girt by many an azure wave 

 With which clouds and mountains pave 

 A lake's blue chasm. 



Spite of melody of phrase having a certain completeness, spite of 

 vivid beauty, one cannot overcome a feeling- of the poem's frag- 

 mentariness ; the melody seems merely stanzaic, and appreciation 

 is bewildered; there is instinctively demanded a striking in of 

 poetic sunlight. The best lyrics always leave a mood of yearning 

 and beauty-desire ; but here we have only a need of fuller ex- 

 pression, and hence an artistic insufficiency. 



In pure song the musical need is omnipresent, so that the 

 simple outburst of mood is last of poems to break free from the 

 musician's art ; but at its best song develops an intrinsic music 

 which satisfies this need, — as imperatively as, for example, does 

 Swinburne's 



If love were what the rose is, 

 And I were like the leaf . . . 



The music may be verbal imitation of the lyric aria, with a termi- 

 nating recurrence of the initial phrase or of its verbal quality. — 

 and by far the most perfect example is Tennyson's threnodic 

 " Break, break, break," throbbing the ocean's perpetuity, — or 

 there may be instead a free outward flow and abandonment to 

 limpid utterance. The first is literally reflective, adapted there- 

 fore to self-conscious expression as in the instances above. Free 

 song, on the other hand, is never self-conscious, and its movement 

 is always natural and unpremeditated, limited only by the singer's 

 breath. It comes as the " careless rapture " of the Elizabethan 

 mood, — all a joyous bubbling over of the singing soul. Usually 

 such song is handily set to music, but it may be tune to itself. 

 When so, it leaves always a suggestion of echo which gives it 

 artistic finality. Take one of Ariel's songs, any one of them : 



Full fathom five thy father lies : 



Of his bones are coral made ; 

 Those are pearls that were his eyes : 



Nothing of him that doth fade. 



379 



