A while back one of our readers asked if we might one day put up a list of our Top Ten or Top Five favorite poems. I responded politely that my preferred mission was to present interesting poems and make observations but not to hinder a reader’s own discoveries.
Fast forward to a breaking of my own rule. I can’t help but say unashamedly that the following poem is one of my all-time favorites. It’s called “Dover Beach” and is by Matthew Arnold.
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.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, 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.
An extraordinary poem! Let’s meet the author.
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Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was born into an academic family, his father serving as the distinguished Headmaster of Rugby School (where the sport originated). Matthew attended there and then Oxford where he won the Newdigate Prize in poetry. He had a reputation as something of a cut-up, but he was likely more Platonic than Byronic, this especially when he reputedly fell in love with a French girl named Marguerite in Switzerland. The relationship ended in due course, but it produced a well-known series of Marguerite poems.
We were apart; yet, day by day,
I bade my heart more constant be.
I bade it keep the world away,
And grow a home for only thee;
Nor fear’d but thy love likewise grew,
Like mine, each day, more tried, more true.
The fault was grave! I might have known,
What far too soon, alas! I learn’d—
The heart can bind itself alone,
And faith may oft be unreturn’d.
Self-sway’d our feelings ebb and swell—
Thou lov’st no more;—Farewell! Farewell!
Farewell!—and thou, thou lonely heart,
Which never yet without remorse
Even for a moment didst depart
From thy remote and spheréd course
To haunt the place where passions reign—
Back to thy solitude again!
Or, if not quite alone, yet they
Which touch thee are unmating things—
Ocean and clouds and night and day;
Lorn autumns and triumphant springs;
And life, and others’ joy and pain,
And love, if love, of happier men.
Of happier men—for they, at least,
Have dream’d two human hearts might blend
In one, and were through faith released
From isolation without end
Prolong’d; nor knew, although not less
Alone than thou, their loneliness.
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Arnold’s poems often reflect our search for meaning in life and the role he could play in supporting the quest. This is from a piece called “Resignation.” Fausta is a symbol of youthful innocence.
Enough, we live:—and if a life,
With large results so little rife,
Though bearable, seen hardly worth
This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth;
Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread,
The solemn hills around us spread,
This stream that falls incessantly,
The strange-scrawl’d rocks, the lonely sky,
If I might lend their life a voice,
Seem to bear rather than rejoice.
And even could the intemperate prayer
Man iterates, while these forbear,
For movement, for an ampler sphere,
Pierce Fate’s impenetrable ear;
Not milder is the general lot
Because our spirits have forgot,
In action’s dizzying eddy whirl’d,
The something that infects the world.
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Arnold’s range as a poet was remarkable, and additionally he was a significant cultural and literary critic, a social commentator and an educator. For 35 years he supported his family as an Inspector of Schools. And down through the years we can still endorse his belief in “the study of humanity, the love of beauty and the pursuit of truth.”
At the end of the day:
Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy’d the sun,
To have liv’d light in the spring,
To have lov’d, to have thought, to have done.
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Arnold’s best buddy at Rugby School and later at Oxford was Arthur Hugh Clough (pronounced “cluff”) who became important as a bridge poet between the Victorian and Modern eras. But this very Victorian poem by Clough remains a hallmark of the period to this day.
Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke conceal’d,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!
In the difficult days of 1941, Winston Churchill quoted the last two stanzas in his “Report on the War” and said, “I believe they will be judged wherever the English language is spoken or the flag of freedom flies.”
Arthur Hugh Clough was born in 1819 in Liverpool. His father was a cotton merchant, and Arthur spent his early years in South Carolina. He was later to return to the States, Massachusetts specifically, to give lectures at the invitation of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
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Clough’s road to Modernism included a frankness about religion and especially sexuality that could be considered shocking for the time.
Here are excerpts from his poem called “Natura Naturans,” a meditation on erotic affinity. The word “car” in the first stanza refers to a railway carriage.
Beside me, in the car, she sat,
She spake not, no, nor looked to me
From her to me, from me to her,
What passed so subtly, stealthily?
As rose to rose that by it blows
Its interchanged aroma flings;
Or wake to sound of one sweet note
The virtues of disparted strings.
Beside me, nought but this! but this,
That influent as within me dwelt
Her life, mine too within her breast,
Her brain, her every limb she felt
We sat; while o’er and in us, more
And more, a power unknown prevailed,
Inhaling, and inhaled, and still
Twas one, inhaling or inhaled.
Unowning then, confusing soon
With dreamier dreams that o’er the glass
Of shyly ripening woman-sense
Reflected, scarce reflected, pass,
A wife may-be, a mother she
In Hymen’s shrine recalls not now,
She first in hour, ah, not profane,
With me to Hymen learnt to bow.
Ah no! Yet owned we, fused in one,
The Power which e’en in stones and earths
By blind elections felt, in forms
Organic breeds to myriad births;
By lichen small on granite wall
Approved, its faintest feeblest stir
Slow-spreading, strengthening long, at last
Vibrated full in me and her.
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Gilbert and Sullivan notwithstanding, Victorians were a pretty sober lot. But here is the satirical side of Clough, imagining a louche life in London. The old-fashioned word “pelf”, meaning ill-gotten money, is still occasionally used in Yorkshire.
As I sat at the café, I said to myself,
They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,
They may sneer as they like about eating and drinking,
But help it I cannot, I cannot help thinking
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
How pleasant it is to have money.
I sit at my table en grand seigneur,
And when I have done, throw a crust to the poor;
Not only the pleasure, one’s self, of good living,
But also the pleasure of now and then giving.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.
It was but last winter I came up to Town,
But already I’m getting a little renown;
I get to good houses without much ado,
Am beginning to see the nobility too.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.
I drive through the streets, and I care not a damn;
The people they stare, and they ask who I am;
And if I should chance to run over a cad,
I can pay for the damage if ever so bad.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.
The best of the tables and best of the fare–
And as for the others, the devil may care;
It isn’t our fault if they dare not afford
To sup like a prince and be drunk as a lord.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.
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At one point in his life, Clough spent six years writing virtually no poetry. He dedicated his energy to serving as a secretarial assistant to his wife’s cousin, Florence Nightingale.
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Arthur Hugh Clough died in 1861 at the age of just 42. His close friend Matthew Arnold wrote a commemorative poem in which he likened Clough to “Thyrsis”, a classical shepherd; and he recalled the days when he and Clough used to roam the countryside together.
Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here,
But once I knew each field, each flower, each stick;
And with the country-folk acquaintance made
By barn in threshing-time, by new-built rick.
Here, too, our shepherd-pipes we first assay’d.
Ah me! this many a year
My pipe is lost, my shepherd’s holiday!
Needs must I lose them, needs with heavy heart
Into the world and wave of men depart;
But Thyrsis of his own will went away.
It irk’d him to be here, he could not rest.
He loved each simple joy the country yields,
He loved his mates; but yet he could not keep,
For that a shadow lour’d on the fields,
Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep.
Some life of men unblest
He knew, which made him droop, and fill’d his head.
He went; his piping took a troubled sound
Of storms that rage outside our happy ground;
He could not wait their passing, he is dead.
So, some tempestuous morn in early June,
When the year’s primal burst of bloom is o’er,
Before the roses and the longest day—
When garden-walks and all the grassy floor
With blossoms red and white of fallen May
And chestnut-flowers are strewn—
So have I heard the cuckoo’s parting cry,
From the wet field, through the vext garden-trees,
Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze:
The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I!
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VIDEO. And now to our Video. The renowned actor, John Neville, was a leading light of Britain’s famous Old Vic Company. For beauty of diction and subtlety of modulation, his reading of “Dover Beach” is all that anyone could ask for.
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: TWO EMINENT VICTORIANS
