Assignment Four: The Lyric (due 3/24)

ASSIGNMENT FOUR: THE LYRIC

ENGL 3150: MOLBERG

Due 3/24

For this assignment we will use the basic understanding of the lyric as a poem in which a first person narrator speaks intensely about personal feeling. It is also important to keep in mind the lyric’s origins in music. Your poems should strive for an economy of language, compression and precision that avoid the wordiness or slackness associated with prose. The lyric falls in the register between song and speech. Be wary of sounding too poetic, too archaic.

Even though the lyric is a poem that expresses emotion, I do not want you to abandon the descriptive and figurative principles we’ve worked with in earlier assignments. The emotional situation of a poem gains richness and power from imagery. In fact, as T.S. Eliot argues, emotion cannot be stated directly, but needs “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events”—what he calls an objective correlative—to express the emotion in a work of art. Imagery is essential in this process—in Hirch’s terms, it allows the poem to enact emotion.

In writing this assignment, you should think about sound. Revisit the course packet entitled “Sound.” You have a further option of selecting a metrical pattern—see Part One of Oliver’s Rules for the Dance—to guide your lines, though this is not necessary. You could work with a repeated stanza pattern as well—rhymed couplets or quatrains.

The poem you hand in should not be the first draft you write. Poetry demands work, and what you first write will need to be rethought and revised until the poem offers what it has to say in a clear and effective manner. Reread your work. Read your poem aloud.

Examples:

The following poem is a sonnet. You may choose to write a sonnet for this assignment, but keep in mind that assignment #5 will also be a poem written in form:

19

-by William Shakespeare

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,

And make the earth devour her own sweet brood,

Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,

And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood,

Make glad and sorry the seasons as thou fleet’st,

And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,

To the wide world and all her fading sweets:

But I forbid thee one most heinous crime,

O carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,

Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;

Him in thy course untainted do allow

For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.

            Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong,

            My love shall in my verse ever live young.

Elegy for Jane

            My student, Thrown by a Horse

            By Theodore Roethke

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;

And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;

And how, once started into talk, the light syllables leaped for her

And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,

Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.

The shade sang with her;

The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;

And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth

Even a father could not find her:

Scraping her cheek against straw;

Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,

Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow.

The sides of wet stones cannot console me,

Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,

My maimed darling, my skitter pigeon.

Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:

I, with no rights in this matter,

Neither father nor lover.

For the Anniversary of My Death

            By W.S. Merwin

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day

When the last fires will save to me

And the silence will set out

Tireless traveler

Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment

Surprised at the earth

And the love of one woman

And the shamelessness of men

As today writing after three days of rain

Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease

And bowing not knowing to what

Leda and the Swan

            By W.B. Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

                                    Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?