Back in college I took a paper called ‘Romantic Masterworks’, where we read four sort of main texts through the year – Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Moby Dick, Byron’s Don Juan, and the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe. And I never properly read Moby Dick, so I re-read it this year as a bit of a throwback, and I hated it – I see what it’s doing, sure, but I’d never recommend it to anybody. It’s ass. And then I got on a bit of a roll and re-read Lyrical Ballads as well, and I kinda hate that too?

I want to work through this in order – because there’s a lot to it. I’m not starting from a place of disliking poetry. I like Ted Hughes, Mary Oliver, I like Virgil’s Georgics – honestly I feel like people who say they dislike poetry really just haven’t read enough poetry to know. It’s like if someone said they don’t like music – you’d think, really? At all? I can imagine someone who doesn’t actively listen to a lot of music, but the idea that anyone hates music as, like, a category of human expression – it’s sort of insane. It’s unfathomable. I feel the same way about poetry. I don’t actually think people hate it, I think people don’t read enough to know what it is. I like stuff from the romantic era too. I like Blake and Shelley, and I’m still getting to know Keats, but I like some of his stuff so far. It’s not that I’m bouncing off the period, and it’s not that I hate poetry generally: I specifically don’t like Lyrical Ballads. Some of the individual poems are good – I like ‘Tintern Abbey’, and some of the others – but overall, yuck.

And this feels like a problem on my part, right – Lyrical Ballads is consistently held up as a high point of English literary culture. Surely there must be something that I’m missing. There’s plenty of poetry that doesn’t necessarily speak to me, but I can appreciate that it’s still good – T.S. Eliot, say. I’m not a huge T.S. Eliot guy. It feels arid. I don’t care about The Waste Land, but I can, you know, appreciate that it’s well-constructed. I can see what’s going on. Lyrical Ballads is often actively bad. Take the opening stanza of ‘The Pet Lamb’:

“The dew was falling fast, the stars began to blink;
I heard a voice; it said, ‘Drink, pretty creature, drink!’
And, looking o’er the hedge, before me I espied,
A snow white mountain lamb with a maiden at its side.”

That’s shit. There’s not really – I don’t know how else to say it. It’s not good. The rhythm is ungainly. Each line is split into two halves of six syllables, and there’s a natural break point between each half – a comma or a sort of hinge word like ‘before’ or ‘with’. That’s okay in concept, but the second line is a stinker. It chops up in the wrong place and the dialogue chokes the flow (“Drink, pretty creature, drink”). The rhyme scheme has this sort of nursery quality to it – each rhymed pair feels very neat and tucked away, resolved, but also childish – not as in ‘for children’, but insubstantial and vapid. Compare something like Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, which has a superficially similar style underpinned by this dark intelligence. If we compare the ‘Nurse’s Song’, for instance:

“When the voices of children are heard on the green
And whisprings are in the dale:
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My face turns green and pale.

Then come home my children, the sun is gone down
And the dews of night arise
Your spring and your day are wasted in play
And your winter and night in disguise.”

Notice here the turning of ‘green’ – in the first line, it’s a place of nature and happiness, the village green that the children are playing on, and in the fourth line it’s curdled to nausea – the nurse’s face turns green. That’s the opposition between innocence and experience, between naivety and knowledge, spring and winter. That opposition runs through the poem – the days of youth rise against the dews of night. The nurse sees childhood as ‘wasted’ in play, but the night of adulthood is equally wasted – and not on anything valuable, anything authentic, but in disguise. The bitterness of an adult looking back at the freedom of youth is tinged by bitterness about the emptiness of adult living. She’s probably not even accurate – like, is this actually a poem about how childhood is a waste, or is this a poem about an adult who’s mad that she’s old? There’s a real density to Blake’s writing. He writes like he’s carving a gem: it’s all facets and reflections, small but compressed, formed by the weight of the earth. He has this aspect of the prophet or the shaman: everything has this gnomic significance. Meanwhile, Lyrical Ballads has stopped at the idea that nature is pretty. It’s this sort of porcelain Little Bo Peep routine. “Drink, pretty creature, drink!” Shut up.

In fairness, not all of Lyrical Ballads is about the sweetness of nature – there is a lot in there about the horrors of poverty, or the tragedies of daily life. ‘The Idiot Boy’ has this bizarre, rolling sort of progression – it cuts against its own premise. The idea is that this woman is sick in the night, and her neighbour sends her mentally disabled son to go and fetch the doctor. He obviously immediately gets lost, and eventually the neighbour has to leave the woman sick in bed and run out to try and find her son – and also bring the actual doctor – and you would expect that premise to go one of two ways. The story sounds like it’s about the sick woman – so you’d expect the neighbour to get the doctor and maybe find her son somewhere lost along the way, or maybe she’ll get the doctor but the boy will have fallen and broken his neck, and it’ll be a poem about social disconnect in rural areas, about the perils of not having people close by, having to rely on unreliable figures because there’s nobody else around. It sounds like a piece about isolation, about distance, an ironic contrast to the overcrowded cities where families are living six to a room. It doesn’t do any of that – the neighbour makes it all the way to the doctor, she wakes him up and goes ‘hey have you seen my son?’, and he goes ‘No?’ and goes back to bed, so she runs back off up the road looking for her boy – and the woman’s just lying in bed sick the whole time, but the focus slowly shifts away from her. It stops being a story about her being sick, and becomes a story about the neighbour trying to find her son. She finds him hanging out somewhere with the horse, and the woman in bed just magically gets better and goes ‘oh well’, and it’s a happy ending. The poem rolls on an axis. It rotates – it starts off being one thing, and then it becomes almost distracted, or it realigns itself in this weird way, and you have to sort of adjust your expectations and move with it. And there’s nothing trying to drum up the tragedy of being mentally disabled, there’s no horrible outcome where the woman dies, or he dies – it’s just sort of silly, and by the end, everything seems blown out of proportion. It’s a gentle, loving poem. It has a softness that undercuts the initial jeopardy and humanises its disabled character – in a way that’s really surprising for 1802.

I did wonder if the issue was the the rhyme scheme – maybe we’ve come to a point where rhyme seems inherently sort of childish. Some of the blank verse pieces in Lyrical Ballads do seem stronger just by virtue of seeming less forced. The fifth poem in ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ starts:

“Our walk was far among the ancient trees;
There was no road nor any wood-man’s path;
But the thick umbrage, checking the wild growth
Of weed and sapling, on the soft green turf
Beneath the branches of itself had made
A track which brought us to a slip of lawn,
And a small bed of water in the woods.”

That flows much better. It feels organic – it doesn’t have that artificial, porcelain quality of ‘The Pet Lamb’. The phrases slip around in their length. The first two phrases run to single pauses – they both pause at the end of each line with those semi-colons. Then we have a half-line phrase (“But the thick umbrage”), a full phrase that runs across two lines (“checking the wild growth / Of weed and sapling”), and then it roars off into the longer two and a half lines up to “a slip of lawn”. That pace has a pleasing musicality. The first two phrases set the scene, giving us this standard 1:1 piece where each phrase runs the length of a line, then that length is offset by the half-section, which syncopates the next full phrase. It sort of bumps the phrase out of position, so even though it’s the same length as the first two, it runs across lines – it just behaves differently in its pacing. One, two, half, one over two, two and a half, one. The whole thing lands back in place with that final single phrase that runs over a single line.’The Pet Lamb’ has a much more rigid structure, with four lines of two halves – and in that rigidity, there’s a weird stumble around the dialogue, which throws off the otherwise quite strictly regulated rhythm.

“The dew was falling fast, the stars began to blink;
I heard a voice; it said, ‘Drink, pretty creature, drink!'”

I wondered for a bit if rhyme itself was sort of the problem – if it just sounds inherently outdated and artificial. That bubble popped as soon as I remembered that rap exists. If you take, for instance, the first couple lines of JID’s ‘Just in Time’:

“Time is of the essence, I’m progressively improvin’
Impressive and I’m pressin’ if you second-guess my movements”

The end of each line rhymes ‘improving’ and ‘movements’, sort of slanting the words to emphasise the ‘oove’ sound in each. There’s also the internal rhyme of the repeating ‘ess’ – essence, progressive, impressive, pressing, guess. The artfulness is the density of the rhyme while still maintaining some sort of semantic meaning and building up the overall picture. You even have that same two half split for each line in the Lil Wayne verse:

“Since the beginnin’ of time I put in the time
And that’s all the time, that’s in time
Put it on the line ’til the finish line
Never crossed the line, stay within the lines”

So the problem isn’t rhyme in itself, right – it’s the specific poem. There are other rhyme schemes in Lyrical Ballads that I think work much better. ‘Written in Germany’ has a good scheme – it’s five lines to a verse, and it rhymes the first, third, and fourth lines, and then the second and fifth (ABAAB):

“Here’s a fly, a disconsolate creature, perhaps
A child of the field, or the grove;
And, sorrow for him! this dull treacherous heat
Has seduc’d the poor fool from his winter retreat,
And he creeps to the edge of my stove.”

That’s fine. It moves along comfortably. It’s not quite in limerick territory (AABBA), but it has that same sense of varied halves joined in unity. The first line moves in and out of rhyme: here it doesn’t rhyme, obviously (‘perhaps’ is set with ‘heat’ and ‘retreat’), but in others it does. The first verse rhymes ‘Norse’ with ‘horse’ and ‘force’, and the second ‘rough’, ‘stuff’, ‘enough’. It doesn’t feel constrained, straitjacketed into place. There’s enough room for it to move around a little – it breathes.

I don’t know. When you sit down and look at it there is good stuff in there. Maybe I just hate ‘The Pet Lamb’.