'Lyric poetry', as understood within the modern world, is both like and unlike the lyric poetry of archaic and early classical Greece. The likeness is apparent, if we compare this, by Sappho,

with this by Robert Burns (1795),

or this, by Ira Gershwin (1927: music by brother George),

The samples are all beginnings of longer sequences, but not long sequences. All are about love, and all assume the stance and persona of one particular individual, who has a relationship with another particular individual. The two individuals are presented as ‘I’, the lover, and ‘you’ or ‘he/she’, the beloved. The lover’s voice we hear as the poet’s ‘own’ voice; the beloved’s voice we may hear of (as in the Sappho), but do not hear as such. There is an implied past to this relationship; there is also an explicit present, within which the relationship is unfulfilled or fraught, and the ‘I’ voices an emotional response to the fact. The voicing is articulated in short, regular stanzas, a form that to us readily suggests song – which, indeed, is literally the case with the original, or presumed, realisations of all the samples.