Lyric songs are the largest and perhaps most poetic layer of Ukrainian folk song, not tied to calendar or family rites. Unlike ritual songs, they express a person's immediate inner world: feelings of love, longing for a beloved, reflections on a hard woman's lot, separation, and loneliness.
It is to the lyric songs that the celebrated drawn-out, “expansive” Ukrainian songs belong, with their characteristic polyphonic texture and deep melodiousness that enchants listeners the world over. The delicacy of feeling, the richness of imagery (the guelder rose, the poplar, the moon, the cuckoo), and the inimitable melody have made the Ukrainian lyric song one of the summits of world song art. It became an inexhaustible source of inspiration for professional composers — from Lysenko to the present day.
