In fact, there will sometimes be a
difference of opinion as regards the classification.
_B. Lyric poetry_ was the name originally applied to poetry that was to be
sung to the accompaniment of the lyre, but now the name is often applied
to poems that are not intended to be sung at all. Lyric poetry deals
primarily with the feelings and emotions. Love, hate, jealousy, grief,
hope, and praise are emotions that may be expressed in lyric poetry. Its
chief varieties are the song, the ode, the elegy, and the sonnet.
A _song_ is a short poem intended to be sung. Songs may be divided into
sacred and secular. _Jerusalem, the Golden_, and _Lead, Kindly Light_, are
examples of sacred songs. Secular songs may be patriotic, convivial, or
sentimental.
An _ode_ expresses exalted emotion and is more complex in structure than
the song. Some of the best odes in our language are Dryden's _Ode to St.
Cecilia_, Wordsworth's _Ode on Intimations of Immortality_, Keats's _Ode
on a Grecian Urn_, Shelley's _Ode to a Skylark_, and Lowell's
_Commemoration Ode_.
An _elegy_ is a lyric pervaded by the feeling of grief or melancholy.
Milton's _Lycidas_, Tennyson's _In Memoriam_, and Gray's _Elegy in a
Country Churchyard_ are all noted elegies.
A _sonnet_ is a lyric poem of fourteen lines which deals with a single
idea or sentiment. It is not a stanza taken from a poem, but is a complete
poem itself. In the Italian sonnet and those modeled after it, the
emotional feeling rises through the first two quatrains, reaching its
climax at or near the end of the eighth line, and then subsides through
the two tercets which make up the remaining six lines.
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