Lyric is to be sung, poetry to be read. Lyric gets it meter from bpms, poetry from iambic patterns -thru stress.
What you can get away with in lyric, you can’t even imagine trying in poetry.
One of my most treasured possessions is “The Complete Poems Of Emily Jane Bronte” as edited from the original manuscripts by C.W. Hatfield and published in 1941. I bought as a very broke twenty something old in the eighties and I have read it so often that, like an album you love, it is part of my DNA.
Emily is the middle child of the Bronte sisters and to my mind the most purely gifted writer ever.
I began today listening to For Science singing “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than spend the night hanging out with you” but for some reason went in search of my Bronte.
Here is one of Emily’s poems:
The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot, cannot go.
The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow,
And the storm is fast descending
And yet I cannot go.
Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me;
I will not, can not go.
I know exactly how Emily Jane felt.