Lyrical Poetry: Characteristics, Metrics, and Structure

Lyrical Poetry: An In-Depth Look

Key Characteristics of Lyrical Poetry

Lyrical poetry is a genre characterized by its subjectivity. The poet offers us a part of their thoughts and their inner vision. The most important feature is that it is written in verse. The expression of the poet's emotion can be performed through other vehicles of expression, like other poetic forms. There is poetry that can be described as epic or not lyrical. In poetry, the author simply tells the story of certain characters, even though it is done in verse.

Defining Features

• The author conveys a particular mood.
• A poem recounts a particular emotion.
• Lyrical poetry requires an effort of interpretation from the reader.
• It usually has a great accumulation of images and elements with symbolic value.
• Most poems are characterized by their brevity and a large concentration of density, which is not found in other genres.
• A poem is the direct expression of the sentiment of the poet to the reader; it should be considered a sort of confidence made in solitude.
• The first person becomes an autobiographical story.
• Poems tend to conform to formal rules that characterize them: verse, stanzas, rhythm, and rhyme, subsumed under the name of metrics.
• The sentimental union of the metrics, debugging, and linguistic resources is called poetics.

The Metrics of Poetry

Metrics is the literary discipline that deals with the lines' structure, classes, and the different combinations that can be formed with them.

Verse

A verse is a group of words put to rhythm and cadence in relation to other verses. It usually includes pauses, accents, and rhyme. Verses are generally classified according to the number of syllables they contain. When counting the number of syllables, we must consider a number of rules:

• If the verse ends in a plain or paroxytone word, the computation does not change.
• If the verse ends in an acute or monosyllabic word, we add one syllable to the resulting computation.
• If the verse ends in an esdrújula or proparoxytone word, we subtract one syllable.
• If a word ends in a vowel and the following word also begins with a vowel or an 'h', we can unite them and count them as one (synalepha).

Rhythm

Rhythm is a phenomenon of regular repetition with a purpose and a reiterated effect. Factors include the measure, accents, pauses, and rhyme.

Rhyme

Rhyme is the repetition of closing sounds in each of the verses that compose a poem. This repetition can be:

• Assonance: When only the vowel sounds are repeated from the last stressed vowel.
• Consonance: When all sounds are repeated from the last stressed vowel.