Poems

Overview

About a hundred pages, the poetry Matthew Arnold wrote across roughly two decades, concentrated between 1849 and 1867, after which he turned most of his considerable energy toward the prose criticism, Culture and Anarchy, Essays in Criticism, that made him the dominant literary critic of the Victorian period. He himself seemed to regard the poetry as, in some sense, a preliminary or lesser achievement, and famously left several of his best poems, including Empedocles on Etna, out of a collected edition, judging their unrelieved unhappiness unsuitable for poetry’s proper function; readers and critics since have generally disagreed with that self-assessment and consider the poetry his most enduring work.

Arnold was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famous reforming headmaster of Rugby School, and spent much of his working life as a government inspector of schools, a demanding and often tedious post he held for over three decades while producing both his poetry and his criticism largely around its edges. The poems are marked throughout by a distinctive tone, not the direct religious doubt of a polemicist but something quieter and sadder: grief for a lost wholeness of belief and purpose that Arnold felt his own age, and often himself personally, could neither recover nor entirely do without.

What happens

Dover Beach. The single most famous poem in the collection, and one of the most anthologized poems in English. A speaker stands at a window overlooking the English Channel at night, describing the calm sea and the moonlit cliffs of France opposite, then the sound of the waves drawing back over the pebbled shore, a sound he calls the eternal note of sadness.

From this physical sound he moves to a historical claim: that Sophocles heard the same note long ago in the Aegean and found in it the turbid ebb and flow of human misery, and that the poem’s speaker now hears something more specific in it, the withdrawal of the Sea of Faith, once, he says, at the full and wrapped like a bright girdle round the earth’s shore, now retreating with a long, melancholy, withdrawing roar, leaving only bare shingles exposed.

The poem turns finally to the person beside him, asking that they be true to one another since the world, so various and beautiful in appearance, actually offers neither joy nor love nor certitude nor peace, and ends with the image most often quoted from Arnold: the two of them as if on a darkling plain, swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night, an image of a world stripped of the shared framework of belief that once made moral and political conflict at least intelligible, now reduced to violence without any agreed sense of what it is for.

The Scholar-Gipsy. A long narrative and meditative poem drawing on a seventeenth-century story, recorded by Joseph Glanvill, of an Oxford student too poor to continue his studies who left the university to join a band of gipsies, in search of the secret art by which they knew how to control the imagination of others, intending eventually to return and share what he had learned.

Arnold imagines this scholar-gipsy as never returning, but instead wandering, untouched by ordinary mortality, through the Oxfordshire countryside for the two centuries since, still nursing the unconquerable hope and clutching the inviolable shade of his single, unwavering purpose. The poem’s second half contrasts this imagined figure’s wholeness and singleness of aim with the condition Arnold diagnoses in his own contemporaries, afflicted by what he calls this strange disease of modern life, its sick hurry and divided aims, a fragmentation of purpose and belief that the scholar-gipsy’s imagined, undivided devotion to one pursuit shows up by contrast.

Thyrsis. An elegy, written after the sudden death of Arnold’s close friend and fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough in 1861, and deliberately composed as a companion piece to The Scholar-Gipsy, returning to the same Oxfordshire landscape and the same pastoral elegiac tradition, descending from Theocritus through Milton’s Lycidas, that mourning poems in English had long drawn on. Arnold searches the countryside for a particular elm tree he and Clough had once noted together, taking it as a private symbol of persistence and hope, and the poem’s underlying question, whether the traditional consolations of pastoral elegy, nature’s continuity standing in for the mourned friend’s, can genuinely console a mind as skeptical and historically self-aware as Arnold’s own, runs beneath its surface throughout.

Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse. Written after a visit to a Carthusian monastery in the French Alps, this poem places Arnold directly between two positions he can occupy fully: he cannot share the monks’ faith, and yet he cannot embrace the confident secular modernity that has supposedly replaced it either. His self-description here, wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, has become the single line most often quoted to summarize his entire outlook and, more broadly, a certain characteristic mid-Victorian experience of standing after the collapse of old religious certainty and before whatever, if anything, might eventually replace it.

Sohrab and Rustum. A narrative poem in blank verse, drawn from Persian legend as mediated through earlier European sources, telling the tragic story of a father, the great warrior Rustum, who unknowingly kills his own son Sohrab in single combat between two opposing armies, each unaware of the other’s identity until the fatal wound has already been given. Different in mode from the more directly personal and meditative poems, it shows Arnold’s considerable skill at sustained narrative verse and at the controlled, classically inflected style he particularly admired and later defended at length in his critical writing on Homeric translation.

How to read it

Read Dover Beach first, and read it more than once. It is short, it contains in miniature nearly every theme the longer poems develop at length, and its final image has become one of the genuinely indispensable phrases in the language for describing a world that has lost its shared moral bearings.

Read The Scholar-Gipsy and Thyrsis as a deliberate pair. Arnold wrote the second explicitly in relation to the first, returning to the same landscape, meter and elegiac mode, and the two poems illuminate each other considerably more than either does read entirely on its own.

Notice how rarely the poems argue directly against religious belief. Arnold’s characteristic mode is not polemic but elegy, mourning a loss rather than making a case, and this distinguishes his religious doubt in tone, though not always in ultimate substance, from more combative Victorian skepticism.

Read the Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse for the single sentence that best summarizes Arnold’s whole poetic project, and then notice how many of the other poems, in different settings and different forms, are essentially working out variations on that same condition of being caught between two worlds.

Read Sohrab and Rustum separately from the more personal, meditative poems, as a demonstration of a different register entirely, sustained classical narrative, and consider what it shares, and what it does not, with the more directly autobiographical work that surrounds it.

Read Arnold’s later prose criticism, particularly The Study of Poetry, alongside the poems if you want to see how the poet who mourned the loss of religious certainty came to argue, in his critical writing, that poetry itself might take over much of religion’s former sustaining and consoling function for a skeptical age.

Questions it raises

• Is Arnold’s grief over lost religious certainty a genuine spiritual crisis, a specifically literary pose, or, as seems most likely, some inseparable combination of both?
• The darkling plain image in Dover Beach suggests that shared belief once made conflict at least intelligible. Is that an accurate account of what religious consensus actually provided?
• Can pastoral elegy’s traditional consolations, nature’s continuity standing in for the mourned dead, genuinely console a mind as historically self-aware and skeptical as Arnold’s? Does Thyrsis succeed at this or knowingly fail?
• What does the scholar-gipsy’s imagined, undivided purpose actually offer as an alternative to modern fragmentation, and is it a realistic ideal or simply an escape into nostalgia?
• Wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born: is this a permanent human condition in times of major belief change, or a specifically nineteenth-century predicament?
• Arnold largely gave up poetry for prose criticism after this period. What did poetry allow him to say that criticism apparently could not?