Lyric Poetry: Essential Characteristics and Metrical Analysis
Characteristics of Lyric Poetry
Lyric poetry has its origins in classical Greece, in sentimental compositions intended to be sung to the accompaniment of the lyre. The lyric genre is subjective par excellence, based on the revelation and deepening of one’s inner self.
The Nature of Lyric Expression
Lyric poetry is dominated by two key features:
- The Expressive Function: Externalization of the author’s feelings, emotions, ideas, or vision of reality. This leads to the author’s regular presence in the poem, expressed through deictic elements and the use of first-person verbs. The presence of the ‘self’ is often accompanied by a ‘thou,’ whose reference is changeable.
- The Aesthetic Function: Utilizes language that empowers stylistic and rhetorical elements, giving critical value to connotation. It often employs a hermetic, opaque language.
Lyric poetry almost always manifests itself in verse, typically in brief compositions.
Subgenres of Lyric Poetry
The most important subgenres include:
- Classical Forms: Ode, elegy, eclogue, epigram, epithalamium.
- Traditional Forms: Song, romance, letrilla, carol.
Metrical Analysis in Poetry
The organizing factor in poetic texts is rhythm, which is based on the existence of rhythmic regularities throughout the text. Analysis of these regularities is the first step in metrical analysis.
Elements of Metrical Analysis
The elements to consider in a metrical analysis are:
Verse Measure
This refers to the number of metrical syllables in a verse. When measuring, the following phenomena that affect the meter should be taken into account:
- Final Accent: Acute (+1 final syllable), proparoxytonic (-1 final syllable).
- Synaloepha: The binding of two or more vowels belonging to different syllables into a single metrical syllable.
- Other Phenomena: Dieresis, synaeresis, compensation, and synapheia.
Rhyme
Rhyme is the repetition of final sounds of verses from the last stressed vowel. It can be of two types: consonant or assonant.
Accentual Rhythm
This is determined by the arrangement of accents in verses.
Poetic Pauses
The fourth and final element is the arrangement of pauses. There are two types of pauses:
- Mandatory Pauses: Occur at the end of a line and prevent synaloepha.
- In lines up to eleven syllables, only the final pause is mandatory.
- In verses of twelve syllables or more, an intermediate pause (caesura) is also mandatory, usually in the middle, dividing the verse into two parts called hemistichs.
- Non-Mandatory Pauses: These occur within lines when there is punctuation (they do not prevent synaloepha).
When the final pause of a line does not coincide with a natural syntactic pause, enjambment occurs.
Understanding Free Verse
If a poem lacks a regular measure and rhyme, it is considered a composition in free verse.
Rhythmic Elements in Free Verse
The rhythmic elements in these poems include:
- Metric variations: dominance of a particular measure, combination and breakdown of traditional metric forms, integration of multiple verses into metric units, scattered rhymes.
- Lexical and semantic repetition: repetition, synonymy.
- Syntactic repetition: enumerations, correlations, parallels.
Categories of Free Verse
Free verse is often classified into three categories:
- Verse-Sentence: Where the verse coincides with a syntactic sentence.
- Line-Verse: Where the verse ends arbitrarily, at the author’s discretion.
- Long Verse: Poetry with very long lines.