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Mathew Arnold 1822-1888 | |
Born in Laleham in 1822, Arnold was the eldest son of Dr Thomas
Arnold, the reforming headmaster of Rugby School. Arnold himself worked as an
inspector of schools for 35 years, and he wrote and lectured extensively on education.
After Rugby (naturally) and Winchester, Arnold attended Balliol College, Oxford,
where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry. While at the university, he formed
a longstanding friendship with another former Rugby pupil, the poet Arthur Hugh
Clough. (Clough was to die in 1861, at just 42 years of age, and Arnold commemorated
his good friend in the elegy Thyrsis.) Arnold's
first volume of poetry, The Strayed Reveller, appeared in 1849. He wrote
and published poetry throughout his life, though as he grew older he devoted more
time to prose, becoming one of the leading social and literary critics of his
day. He later proved a significant influence on T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis, among
others.
Often mistakenly regarded as an earnest Victorian, Arnold was
deeply troubled by the inadequacies of his age, a period he described as 'wanting
in moral grandeur.' Much of his finest poetry, Empedocles on Etna, The
Scholar-Gypsy, Memorial Verses to Wordsworth and Sohrab and Rustrub,
based on a Persian Epic, was produced during the1850s, a period of immense social
and intellectual upheaval, when science was brusquely dashing aside old certainties.
Perhaps, his finest, and his best-known, poem is Dover Beach, a personal
lament, published in the aftermath of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
Arnold on Arnold: From a Letter to his Mother in 1869.
'My poems represent,
on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and
thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves
of what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary productions which
reflect it. It might be fairly urged that I have less poetical sentiment than
Tennyson, and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning; yet, because
I have more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly
applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough
to have my turn, as they have had theirs.' |
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Dover
Beach (1867)
THE sea is calm to-night.
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 ebb meets the moon-blanch'd sand, 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.
Sophocles
long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, 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 furl'd;
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.
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