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As to Poetry, with a fine instinct we generally begin by writing verse, because verse is the last thing that the public want to read. The young writer has usually read a great deal of verse, however, and most of it bad. His favourite authors are the bright lyrists who sing of broken hearts, wasted lives, early deaths, disappointment, gloom.
Just so the lyrists of fields and woods pipe their roundels and chansons through the chink in their throats, save that in the bird's case the mouth and tongue are anterior to the whistling aperture. I know a young man who has trained himself so as to be able to mimic to perfection the complex songs of the western meadowlark and the cardinal grosbeak. He does it by whistling.
There are those who think that, if mere concettism be a part of poetry, Quarles is as great a poet as Cowley or George Herbert, Vaughan or Withers. On this question, and on the real worth of the seventeenth century lyrists, a great deal has to be said hereafter.
We must not, then, suppose, misled by the vulgar accounts of the Athenian drama, that the contest for the goat, and the buffooneries of Thespis, were its real origin; born of the epic and the lyric song, Homer gave it character, and the lyrists language. Thespis and his predecessors only suggested the form to which the new-born poetry should be applied.
Its face grins of war, like a skeleton of death; the salient image of the skull and congregating worms was one that Italian lyrists applied naturally to Verona.
Soon after 1600 a change in lyric poetry is noticeable. The sonnet fell into disfavor with the majority of lyrists. The two poets of greatest influence over this period, Ben Jonson and John Donne, opposed the sonnet.
She had taken up a pretty, tiny little book that lay on his table, called Lyrists of the Restoration, and began to read aloud: 5165 'Phyllis is my only joy, Faithless as the winds or seas, Sometimes cunning, sometimes coy, Yet she never fails to please. 'Oh, please, stop, Aylmer cried. She looked up. 'It tinkles like an old-fashioned musical-box. Try another.
Of these four Italian poets perhaps only the severe Florentine has won his way outside of the boundaries of the language he did so much to ennoble, altho it may be admitted that the gentle Petrarch had also for a century a wide influence on the lyrists of other tongues.
But taking her as the perfectly unanimous conception of the lyrists, how is it she did not discover these things unaided? Why does the lover invariably imagine her with a mind intensely irritable under his own praise and poetry? Obviously we cannot have her explanation of any of these matters. Why do the poets so much lament the absence of truth in one whose truth would be of little moment?
Her "No" was set to counterpoint in the part-song, and she frightened Love out of her sight in a ballet. Those occupations are gone, and the lovely Elizabethan has slipped away. She was something less than mortal. But she who was more than mortal was mortal too. This was no lady of the unanimous lyrists, but a rare visitant unknown to these exquisite little talents.
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