The English Lyric 45 



to poetic need. That need, as always, was for the subtler 

 interpretation of human instinct. Passed from the social to the 

 individual nature of man, from the ethical and objective to the 

 spiritual world, it becomes perforce more and more symbolical. 

 This is what I mean by the turn into metaphor. In song we see 

 it in a slow-winning freedom from thralldom of sense ; in balladry 

 in the dominance of spiritual over ethical motive ; but best it is 

 revealed in that lyric restlessness and poignancy which is the 

 supreme poetic utterance of the age. 



VII. THE LYRIC AND MODERNITY 



Reflective poetry has so grown upon us of late generations that 

 there is need of a fuller vocabulary of distinctions than is com- 

 monly in use. We distinguish adequately enough those forms of 

 gnomic poetry — didactic, satiric, and epigrammatic verse — which 

 deliver sententious sentiment or- quizzical philosophizing ; but we 

 have no very good term for that more seriously reflective poetry, 

 sometimes elegiac in tone, sometimes idyllic, sometimes, as 

 Khayyam's Rubaiyat, light-lipped and hopeless. Poetry of this 

 class verges toward a logical rather than a lyrical order. It lives 

 largely in a realm of knowing, and the knowing is of a spiritual, 

 semi-mystical, gnostic order. Such poetry aims to interpret 

 truth, — stressing both the interpretation and the truth. The in- 

 terpretation is not mere expression, it is a rendering in the pecu- 

 liar color of the poet's personality, from an introspective attitude. 

 And the truth is not the brute fact of scientific interests, but it is 

 the vital, human truth of things. This semi-intellectual element 

 is present in pure lyricism, but it does not tyrannize over mood 

 and movement as in the quasi-lyrical forms. There is something 

 of an antipode between poetic philosophizing and the naive utter- 

 ance of mood ; and while both may be fused, as in Wordsworth's 

 On Intimations of Immortality, there is much good poetry of the 

 Locksley Hall sort in which lyrical form and movement are too 

 thoroughly subordinated to the intellectual leadings of the theme 

 to warrant alignment with the same type. But the distinction 

 must not be made insistent. As quaint Dr. Aitkin notes, the 



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