Lyric poetry has three academically recognized features that are usually stated as emotion, imagination and melody.

Friends, behold!
In a sacred manner
I have been influenced
At the gathering of the clouds.
Sacred I have been made. (excerpt from "Song Concerning a Dream of the Thunderbirds")

Upon examining this excerpt from the poem, we see that the poetic phrase "gathering of the clouds" in association with being made sacred ("Sacred I have been made") is an example of the feature of imagination. Imagination envisions clouds and the glory of sacredness.

The stirring line "Sacred I have been made" is an example of melody. The word "sacred" conveys an innate musicality because of meaning combined with phonetic sounds [/s/ /a/ /r/]. When "sacred" is in arrangement with the personal pronoun "I" and the state of having "been made" (or transformed), melody is produced. In its simplest terms, melody is vocal pitch and rhythm: melody is how vocal pitch moves up or down, doing so fast or slow.

The speaker's emotion is first displayed in this excerpt in the excited line "Friends, behold!" The speaker is metaphorically standing on the mountaintop or shouting from the rooftop the good news of sacred transformation. The speaker is emotionally triumphant, rejoicing and calling friends to celebrate.

Lyric poetry is expressive of the speaker's deepest emotions. Deep emotions are described through the speaker's deepest flights of imagination (imagination is inspiration which is beyond intellectual thought). Expressions of imagination are arranged according to the speaker's deepest sense of melody. A lyre was historically tied to the performance of lyric poetry, which was historically sung and accompanied, but the melody of the lyric poem derives from the speaker's sense of melody within words and between words: melody is shown in the arrangement of words, as explained by Ni Wayan Swardhani W. of Universitas Brawijaya, Indonesia, in "Defining Poetry and Characteristics of Poetry."