Plotting the lyric: forms of narration in poetry

Abstract

This article is based on the assumption that lyric poems generally share the fundamental constituents of story and discourse as well as the narrative act with narrative fiction in that they likewise feature a sequence of incidents (usually of a mental kind), mediate and shape it from a specific perspective and present it from a particular point of time vis-à-vis the sequence of incidents. A general outline of the narratological categories which may be applied to poetry analysis is given using William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud” as an illustrative example. The aim of the article is heuristic: the intention is not to blur the distinction between fiction and poetry and treat poems indiscriminately as narrative texts, but rather identify and highlight the specifically poetic forms and functions which instances of narrating adopt in poems. The main section of the article will then focus on the first of the three aspects mentioned, the modelling of poetic sequentiality, i.e. the specification of types of plot, plotting and presentation of plot in poetry and the analysis of their functions.