Characteristics:
* Subjective: Focuses on the poet's feelings, reflections, and personal experiences. It often uses "I" or "me" to express a personal perspective.
* Musicality: Employs rhythm, rhyme, and other sound devices to create a pleasing and memorable effect. This can include a variety of poetic forms like sonnets, odes, and elegies.
* Emotional: Conveys a strong emotional response, ranging from joy and love to sorrow and grief. It aims to evoke feelings in the reader through the use of vivid imagery, metaphors, and other literary devices.
* Concise: Generally shorter than narrative poems and focuses on a single idea or emotion.
* Figurative language: Employs metaphors, similes, imagery, and other figures of speech to create vivid and evocative language.
Examples of Lyric Poetry:
* Sonnets: Like Shakespeare's sonnets, exploring themes of love, beauty, and mortality.
* Odes: Like Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," celebrating a specific subject with passion and eloquence.
* Elegies: Like Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H.," mourning the loss of a loved one.
* Love poems: Expressing the emotions of love, passion, and longing.
* Nature poems: Reflecting on the beauty and wonder of the natural world.
Difference from Narrative Poetry:
While narrative poems tell a story, lyric poems explore emotions and personal experiences. A narrative poem focuses on plot, characters, and action, while a lyric poem centers on the speaker's inner world.
In essence, a lyric poem is like a musical expression of the soul, capturing a moment of personal reflection and emotion.