Excerpt from A LONG HIGH WHISTLE by David Biespiel

IF YOU HAVE TO ASK

 

Once a reader wrote to say that I often use the expression “lyric

poetry,” but what does it mean?

 

It’s a great question, though part of me wants to respond as Louis

Armstrong did when asked to define jazz: If you have to ask, you’ll

never know.

 

Ancient poetry was oral, often chanted, and arose out of the

pleasure human beings discovered when combining words into a

meaningful sequence and using the melismatic rhythms of one’s voice

to impart feelings. The traditional definition of lyric is that of a poem

composed to be sung by a solitary singer, with musical accompaniment,

on a single theme, and as an expression of personal feeling.

 

This singing or chanting led to poetical schemes to improve clarity,

such as common melodies, refrains, rounds, and rhymes. What

we’ve come to think of as forms—sonnets, for instance—are really

abstractions. They became useful when poetry was eventually written

instead of memorized, and they were tests of a poet’s mastery of

imagination and language.

 

Remember the Scotsman Robert Burns’s lyric?

 

O my luve’s like a red, red rose

That’s newly sprung in June:

O my luve’s like the melodie,

That’s sweetly play’d in tune.

 

To read it from a purely technical stance is to see that it contains a

4/3 metrical rhythm—four accented beats in the first and third lines

tethered to the three accented beats in the second and fourth lines,

something like “o MY luve’s LIKE a RED, red ROSE / That’s NEWly

SPRUNG in JUNE.”

 

It’s a rhythm Cole Porter could have written—and often did:

 

Your fetching physique is hardly unique,

You’re mentally not so hot;

You’ll never win laurels because of your morals,

But I’ll tell you what you’ve got.

 

The soft stress of a sound followed by a hard stress of a sound—that’s

the root rhythm of lyric poetry in English. And yet, only a few

people a hundred miles outside of Edinburgh can probably sing the

customary melody that goes with “A Red, Red Rose,” and Porter’s

“You’ve Got That Thing” is scored and accompanied by piano.

 

So here’s the important difference, since about the sixteenth century.

 

Modern lyric poetry isn’t sung and doesn’t require musical

accompaniment. Instead, lyric poetry is more like rhythmic speaking.

The accompaniment is silence.

 

It may be best to think of the phrase lyric poetry as a metaphor,

one that contains the idea of the ancient poetic singer but isn’t a singer

exactly. And still, while there is an implied social contract, think of

it as a solitary speaker. Or, as the late Donald Justice, once put it,

lyric poetry is “a kind of virtual speech. It becomes that by imitating

speech which might actually be spoken on some occasion.”

 

Donald Justice’s “Bus Stop” is just this sort of lyric poem. Set

in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill where the poet once lived, the poem

contains musical qualities, such as repetition, that you might associate

with song:

 

Lights are burning

In quiet rooms

Where lives go on

Resembling ours.

 

The quiet lives

That follow us—

These lives we lead

But do not own—

 

Stand in the rain

So quietly

When we are gone,

So quietly…

 

And the last bus

Comes letting dark

Umbrellas out—

Black flowers, black flowers.

 

And lives go on.

And lives go on

Like sudden lights

At street corners

 

Or like the lights

In quiet rooms

Left on for hours,

Burning, burning.

 

The multi-layered repetition of the words lights, burning, rooms, quiet,

quietly, lives, black flowers, go on creates a chiming cadence (add to that

the rhyme and distant imbedding of ours into hours). The effect of the

echo seems to reinforce the speaker’s isolation.

 

But don’t take it from me. Take it from Justice. “Bus Stop” is

“unmistakably a lyric poem,” he wrote, “which by its nature could

stand quite a lot of sound [his italics] . . . I wanted anything which

had to do with the sound or music to come in very simply and in

a completely natural way, almost as though by chance . . . If rhymes

showed up—and they did—they were to remain casual, not part of a

deliberate scheme . . . Repetition—a type of rhyme itself—turned out

to play a larger role in the sound of the poem . . . The effect came to

resemble what you get in a poem with multiple refrains, or, more

fancifully, when several bells are set swinging at different timings.”

Sound is just one quality of lyric poetry. More could be said

about lyric poetry’s use of metaphor or its general brevity and sensuous

imagery, for instance—and it begs the question, thinking of my earlier

example, why does it give us pleasure to imagine love as a red, red rose?

 

It gives us pleasure because lyric poetry is a literary presentation

that isolates human experience and connects the solitary voice of the

poet to anyone willing to listen.

 

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