With all his fastidiousness and superciliousness and officiality, Arnold is more intimate with us than Browning, more intimate than Tennyson ever is except at moments, as in the passionate flights in In Memoriam. He is the poet and critic of a period of false stability. All his writing in the kind of Literature and Dogma seems to me a valiant attempt to dodge the issue, to mediate between Newman and Huxley; but his poetry, the best of it, is too honest to employ any but his genuine feelings of unrest, loneliness and dissatisfaction.
T. S. ELIOT: The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)
Matthew Arnold, the son of Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School, was educated at Winchester, Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry with ‘Cromwell’ (1843). Two years later he became a Fellow of Oriel College, but left Oxford to become private secretary to Lord Lansdowne. In his mid-twenties while in Switzerland he met a young woman who inspired the series of ‘Marguerite’ poems. Her name, like that of Heine’s muse who inspired many of the Buch der Lieder poems, has never been satisfactorily identified, but Arnold wrote from Switzerland to his friend A. H. Clough that he wished to ‘linger one day at the Hotel Bellevue for the sake of the blue eyes of one of its inmates’. The relationship failed to prosper, and Arnold eventually married Frances Lucy Wightman, who bore him six children, three of whom pre-deceased him.
He became an inspector of schools in 1851, travelling the length and breadth of England for thirty-five years, observing the social conditions that featured in both his prose works and his poems, of which ‘West London’ is a fine example. Between 1849 and 1867 he published several volumes of poems at regular intervals: The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849), Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems (1852), Poems (1853), Poems Second Series (1855), Merope (1858) and New Poems (1867). Though he wrote in a variety of forms – lyrics, ballads, poetic drama, elegies and occasional poems – there is a consistency about his themes, which are often characterized by introspection, sadness, alienation, spiritual emptiness and a brooding contemplation of the countryside. Arnold became Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1858 and ironically, apart from New Poems (which contained two of his most famous: ‘Rugby Chapel’ and ‘Heine’s Grave’), wrote prose for the rest of his life. Essays in Criticism (first series) appeared in 1865 and was followed by the posthumous publication of the second series (1888). Culture and Anarchy (1869), Saint Paul and Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma (1873), God and the Bible (1875) and Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877) all, in their different ways, deal with the arts, religion and society, and attack dogmatism and unthinking orthodoxy.
‘Dover beach’ was probably written on his honeymoon in 1851, and, like no other poem of the Victorian era, it voices the uncertainties of belief brought on by modern life. One problem for poets was that the new industrial age tended to look down on literature and saw it as a frivolous, dispensable luxury.
Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again.1
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.
Come, as thou cam’st a thousand times,
A messenger from radiant climes,
And smile on thy new world, and be
Or, as thou never cam’st in sooth,
Come now, and let me dream it truth.
And part my hair, and kiss my brow,
And say – My love! why sufferest thou?
Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again.
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.
Far, far from each other
Our spirits have grown;
And what heart knows another?
Ah! who knows his own?
Blow, ye winds! lift me with you!
I come to the wild.
Fold closely, O Nature!
Thine arms round thy child.
Ah, calm me! restore me;
And dry up my tears
On thy high mountain-platforms,
Where morn first appears.
My pent-up tears oppress my brain,
My heart is swollen with love unsaid.
Ah, let me weep, and tell my pain,
And on thy shoulder rest my head!
Before I die – before the soul,
Which now is mine, must re-attain
Immunity from my control,
And wander round the world again;
Before this teased o’erlaboured heart
For ever leaves its vain employ,
Dead to its deep habitual smart,
And dead to hopes of future joy.
Strew no more red roses, maidens,
Leave the lilies in their dew –
Pluck, pluck cypress, O pale maidens
Dusk, oh, dusk the hall with yew!
– Shall I seek, that I may scorn her,
Her I loved at eventide?
Shall I ask, what faded mourner
Stands, at daybreak, weeping by my side?
Pluck, pluck cypress, O pale maidens!
Dusk the hall with yew!
Crouched on the pavement, close by Belgrave Square,
A tramp I saw, ill, moody, and tongue-tied.
A babe was in her arms, and at her side
A girl; their clothes were rags, their feet were bare.
Some labouring men, whose work lay somewhere there,
Passed opposite; she touched her girl, who hied
Across, and begged, and came back satisfied.
The rich she had let pass with frozen stare.
Thought I: ‘Above her state this spirit towers;
She will not ask of aliens, but of friends,
Of sharers in a common human fate.
‘She turns from that cold succour, which attends
The unknown little from the unknowing great,
And points us to a better time than ours.’
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the Straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles2 long ago
Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.3