Matthew Arnold
Mid Victorian Backdrop
-economic prosperity
-religious controversy (Darwin 1859)
-complacency, stability, optimism
Arnold looked to the life of the imagination as a place of refuge from the spirit of the
age.
Deals with the problem of how to decide which religious, social, and artistic traditions to
maintain in an increasingly commercial and industrialized world.
Materialistic middle classes (Philistines)
• preoccupied with law, morality, conduct, judgment
• guided by conventional thinking
• incapable of responding to beauty and art
Deals with problem of the artist
• rejects moral aesthetic (that art should teach)
• rejects socially imposed restrictions on artists
• struggles with conflict between public duty (self-sacrifice) and personal belief (self-fulfillment)
• to adjust to society means to become estranged from the self
From “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” (1855):
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Believes Culture (education and cultivation of intellect) will cure society’s ills
Like the Romantics, he yearned for an innocence he felt had been lost--The loss of faith
and innocence in his culture in general-- but he prefigured the Moderns of the early
twentieth century in his sense that society was fragmenting, and along with it the human
soul.
• an obsession with the problem of estrangement
• protagonists of his poems are invariably lonely and isolated figures, alien to
their environment
Quits writing poetry and concentrates on criticism
• Poetry must “rejoice and inspirit” those who read it, and he didn’t think his
poetry could do that
• Living in an un-poetic time
Matthew Arnold: Poems for closer study
“To Marguerite-continued” (1852)
1. In "To Marguerite--Continued," what is the speaker’s lament?
2. How does he use the metaphor of islands and the ocean to emphasize his point?
3. The speaker invokes the image of Keats’ nightingales in stanza 2. What is his point?
From “Ode to a Nightingale” p.1845
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
4. Who ordered the isolation of the islands (the human beings)? What do you make of
this suggestion?
“The Buried Life” (1852)
1. What is the "buried life"? Is it ever accessible, either in part or in full? What obstacles
hinder us when we try to gain access to it?
2. What is the relationship between language and emotional expression? What, if
anything, does the speaker's treatment of language suggest about Arnold's view of
poetry's value?
3. What solution does the poem offer for alleviating the individual's isolation and inability
to feel? Do you find that solution convincing? Why or why not?
“Dover Beach” (1867)
1. Who is the speaker of this poem? Who is he talking to? Imagine the circumstance of
their meeting/conversation: where do you think they are and what are they doing there?
2. Describe the setting in lines 1-6. How does this setting change in lines 7-14?
3. Trace the global metaphor of the sea in the poem, from stanza 1 to stanza 2 to
stanza 3. Note how the metaphor evolves. In what way does the sea become
emblematic of Mid-Victorian consciousness?
4. What is the speaker’s lament and how does he choose to resolve it?
What kind of collective picture do these poems provide of the Victorian world and
of human relationships, especially love relationships, in that world?
“The Scholar Gipsy” (1853)
The scholar gipsy flees Oxford in pursuit of a philosophical quest, to learn the secret
teachings of the gypsies and escape modern life.
Romantic poem up through stanza 13. Becomes “Victorian” afterwards. Explain why.
Themes:
personification of the alienated artist/intellectual
conflict between individual and society, between youth and age
romantic idealism, the spirit of youthful escape
Symbols:
Arnold’s Gipsy = freedom from restraint, from Victorian earnestness
Scholar Gipsy’s Quest = pursuing life of the imagination / self-isolation / selffulfillment
Contrasted Settings:
Natural, romantic landscape of the scholar gipsy wandering the Oxford
countryside
Urbane landscape of the speaker, with its “sick hurry, its divided aims” (line
204)
Speaker implores scholar to stay away—protect his quest by staying out of society
“Wave us away, and keep thy solitude” (line 210)