ABSTRACT
As the preceding chapters have shown, lyric has typically taken the form of an expression of love for a corporeal lover or for a transcendent, spiritualised presence. This chapter assesses lyric modes – love poems, elegies and devotional verse – that are animated by yearning or desire in both spiritual and secular guises. The first section traces the development of the love poem from its classical origins through to the modern period. From its earliest moments, the love lyric has tended to ‘focus more on the lover than on love itself’ (Blevins 2004: 2) and, since the early modern period, it has become acutely self-aware. By exploring the reworking of Petrarchan conventions from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through to the contemporary period, the discussion demonstrates that the love lyric has been concerned as much with the poetics of subjectivity as with erotic physicality and emotional attachment. The section also reveals the love poem as an arena in which dominant constructions of gender and sexuality are affirmed and contested. The discussion then examines the affinities between elegy and lyric. These modes share an ancient
lineage, in that both involve song and solitary speakers, and their structures of address and expressions of feeling are predicated upon absence or loss. The chapter finally examines the tradition of devotional poetry from the medieval period to the present. It considers how the love poem and religious lyric have often been interwoven and at times mutually reinforcing, whether in the idealising of the lover in the Petrarchan tradition or the eroticisation of spiritual language in devotional verse. The love lyric, the elegy and the religious poem place a textual self in dialogue with the other, whether it be a lover, the dead or the divine, and they often deploy elaborate modes of address in an attempt to bridge the gap between the ‘I’ and an unattainable presence. From the courtly love sonnet to the hymn and the apostrophe, the lyric mode strives to reach beyond the limits of language, yet it remains anchored in the present moment of its utterance. The enduring power of lyric lies in the way it plays out this tension between the ‘here and now’ and the timeless.
