Chapter 2

DARK LYRICS AND LYRICS OF ECSTASY

Intrinsic to the lyric, from its earliest beginnings, is music. The word itself, from the Greek "lyra" meaning "a musical instrument," discloses something of its history as a vehicle for man's spontaneous melodic expression. Lyrics now are rarely composed for musical accompaniment, but they still wear many of the essential features of song in the form of their presentation, in their length and in their span.

In its modern application, the term "lyric" strictly refers to poems in which the speaker, a single distinctive voice, captures a particular emotion or moment. The frame of reference is personal, the scale of time necessarily episodic, and the major characteristic of the content is its unmixed quality The lyric concerns itself with a moment, abstracted from the flow of time and the dimension of social reality and seen alone, supported only by interior reality, in a light that is at once timeless and mythic. If that same moment were to be examined in the context of a man's life, perceived as the fruit of a thousand subtle influences and as the link between countless future events we would, perforce, be dealing in the epic genre. But the emphasis in lyric is not in the interplay of foreground and background, the history-bound context of an individual life. The lyric poet sings to us of presence, not the presence of personality, a social phenomenon, but the presence of a state of being. And in exploring the essence of this state, he invariably impresses his own distinct shape upon it. We recognise the Hopkins of the so-called "terrible" sonnets, for example, not because we relate them to the poet's life in Dublin, but because of the poet's intense struggle with self, his vigorous confrontation with God.