Survey of Matthew Arnold's Poetical Works

Along with The Strayed Reveller had appeared The Forsaken Merman, Mycerinus, To a Gipsy Child, Resignation, and the sonnets, To a Friend and Shakespeare. This volume and the next one, Empedocles which was accompanied with Memorial Verses, A Summer Night and Stanzas in Memory of the Author of 'Obermann' indicate more or less completely the entire range and scope of Arnold's genius as a poet. The predominantly Greek interest of most of their contents is at once noticeable. Homer, Epictetus and Sophocles had influenced him most and among the English poets Wordsworth. There are echoes of the choric odes of the Attic tragedy in The Strayed Reveller and of Wordsworth's Laodamia in Mycerinus. The serious reflections in To a Gipsy Child are also in Wordsworthian manner:

"Thy sorrow and thy calmness are thine own; Glooms that enhance and glorify this earth."

From Epictetus, he learnt that virtue consists in endurance, in social fortitude and, like Sophocles, he tried to see life steadily and to see it whole,...."But be his

My special thanks, whose even balanced soul, From first youth tested up to extreme old age, Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily and saw it whole."

In his theory of poetry, he was a confirmed classicist and the supremacy of antique literature led him to believe that really great poetry is only impersonal poetry. To this class belong his Sohrab and Rustam, Empedocles on Etna, Baider Dead and Tristram and Iseult. Sohrab and Rustam is an epic poem, stately and impressive in character but too reminiscent of Homer. Some of the Homeric similes are indeed dignified but nothing surpasses in beauty the description of the quiet flow of the river Oxus. There is a good deal of Arnold himself in the characterization of Empedocles, who muses on man's mediocre lot and speculates on the fate of the soul after death, before plunging into the crater of Etna for death. He is 'the weary man, the banished citizen.' simula a boost

In spite of too much deliberate imitation of Homer, the spirit of the oriental tale is not quite lost in Sohrab and Rustam, but Balder Dead is much less interesting. He has missed altogether the Scandinavian spirit, as he had no real understanding of the barbaric delight in 'blood and battle'. He could not enter into the spirit of the fierce loves and hates, which are the essence of the Northern sagas. Arnold's own spirit is, as in Empedocles, reflected in Balder's words to Hermod:

"Mine eyes are stunn'd with blows

-and sick for calm."

The Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis are well known for their pastoral and elegiac mood. These poems owe their success not to the ancient examples of Theocretus, Bion or Moschus but to Arnold's genuine love of the Oxford countryside. The lovely little vignettes of nature are tender and charming. Between the two Thyrsis is more of a conventional pastoral elegy. But it is not a memorial poem like Tennyson's In Memorium. Clough's idyllic side and his association with the Oxford countryside are commemorated in this poem. The poignancy of the loss of a dear friend is nowhere felt and as Arnold himself wrote to Sharp, "One has the feeling, if one reads the poem as a memorial poem, that not enough is said about Clough in it." There is nothing like the Platonic note of Adonais or the desperate grief of In Memorium. The note of Wordsworth and of Gray's Elegy predominates in Thyrsis. The two stanzas which contrast the tempestuous morn in early June with the high midsummer pomps are unsurpassed in their beauty. Among Arnold's favourite passages may be quoted the famous lines:

"O easy access to the heaven's grace,
When Dorian Shepherds sang to Proserpine.

And long the way appears, which seem'd so short
To the unpractised eye of sanguine youth."

Though the essence of classicism is to be found in all his poetry, it was only occasionally that he chose an antique theme. But he was not very successful when he did so. Merope is almost a failure. The subject of Empedocles is ancient but, as has been already pointed out, the poet speaks through the lips of the hero.

The mistake of the classical experiment of Merope is redeemed by the New Poems of 1867. His elegiac mood is nobly enshrined in the Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, Heine's Grave and Memorial Verses. The subject as in The Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis is the condition of the modern life; its 'sick hurry' and 'divided aims'. A calm sad undertone pervades them all. We need a Columbus to guide us over a trackless ocean. In A Summer Night, the helmsman is:

"Grasping the rudder hard,

Still bent to make some port he knows not where,
Still standing for some false, impossible shore."

The problem has grown very complex. Even Goethe could not suggest a remedy. He could only spot the disease:

Physician of the iron age,
Goethe has done his pilgrimage.
He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness
clear; And struck his finger on the place,
And said: Thou ailest here, and here!"

In Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, he is more than just to the spirit of resignation, to the spirit of asceticism, to the acceptance of a cloistered life. He refrains from showing the deformities of a cloistered virtue. But Arnold's resignation is the nobler resignation of stoical endurance, inspired by a sense of duty and not helped by any hope of reward. And that is the spirit of his Resignation. His agnosticism is thus the outcome, as in the case of Goethe, of his intellectual sincerity. The hopeless tangle of the age' makes resignation a necessity. This is further accentuated by his realization of the loneliness of man. This is most beautifully expressed in his poem, To Marguerite:

"Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watering wild
We mortals live alone."

Conclusion

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