Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/63

 Rh tragedy. The poem in its mock heroics is a sly satire of the grand manner of the romantic epic. But beyond the entertainment it furnishes by the way, in it is reflected Chaucer's own genial though shrewd criticism of life; and we enjoy this contact with the poet's own personality. So in all narrative poetry of conscious art, whether the "Faerie Queene" or "Paradise Lost," Keats's "Endymion" or "Enoch Arden," whether it portrays the figures of romance and fable, or whether it treats the high argument of God's ways with man or a tragedy of humble souls, we discern the image of a heightened and intenser world, which serves finally to express the poet's own way of conceiving life, his interpretation of experience.

THE RISE OF THE LYRIC The same trend toward greater personality in expression which changes the import of narrative poetry gives rise to poetry of a different kind and purpose. As the individual emerges out of the mass into consciousness of himself, he is made aware that life comes to him, in contrast to other men, with a difference. The world is his world, passions are his passions, events take their significance as they relate themselves somehow to his own experience. The great sky arches overhead, brightly blue or piled with tossing clouds. Outward in every direction reaches the broad earth, a crowded pageantry of color and form and sound and stir. Just at the center, the meeting point of all these energies, stands a man, thinking, feeling, willing. Upon him as a focus converge all rays of influence from the inclosing world. Responding to their impact, he perceives a sudden harmony within the tumult of sensation and flashing idea, a harmony which is beauty, and his whole being is flooded with emotion. His joy, wonder, worship, surge to expression. Out of the chaos he compels a new order, the image of his perception; and this he bodies forth in material form through the medium of words, shaping it after the pattern of his perception, and moulding it to his mood. The mighty pulse of nature bids him to sing, to voice his insight and his feeling in accordant rhythm. So out of the fullness of his spirit, quickened by the beauty of the world and its inner meaning, wells a song. The lyric is born.