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!The second subject, Love, returns in the final verse-paragraph: ‘Ah, love, let us be
true / To one another!’ But nature and love, beauty and passion, are not at the heart
of the poem. There is a new reason why the lovers must 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.From this island once brightly girdled by ‘the Sea of Faith’, Arnold can ‘only hear its
melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’. He had gone from his father’s Rugby School to
an Oxford torn between Tractarianism and liberalism, and from his father’s Broad
Church liberal faith to realizing that the Bible was only partly historical. A. H.
Clough,Arnold’s friend and his father’s prize pupil, resigned his college fellowship
in 1848,unable to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England.
This crisis of faith in Christianity lent Arnold a keen sense of human isolation,
expressed in the poetry of his earlier career. ‘I have less poetical sentiment than
Tennyson,’ he was to write to his mother, ‘and less intellectual vigour and abun-
dance than Browning;ye t, because I have perhaps 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.’ Arnold’s self-analysis is
clear-sighted,as is his forecast that ‘the movement of mind’ would bring him read-
er s. His diagnosis of the moral ailments of modern life is sound, but he saw also
that his poems lack the tonic effect of true tragic poetry. They are intensely sad,
whereas his later prose, forging new roles for literature and religion in society,
sparkles with wit.
Arnold’s best poetry is personal, a category which in his case includes intellectual
autobiography (‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’ and ‘The Buried Life’) and
poems to other writers, as well as the love poems to Marguerite and the academic
pastorals,The Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis. In all these poems, land, water and sky lend
symbolic power and plangency. His literary criticism is impersonal, ‘seeing life
steadily and seeing it whole’, applying the moral and intellectual criterion of ‘high
seriousness’, asserting that great literature is ‘a criticism of life’, and quoting briefly
to show what is classic. Arnold’s poetic criticism has not been improved upon, even
by Eliot,who borrowed much from him. His command of classical, European,
English and biblical literature shows the quality of high Victorian culture. Scholar-
critics such as W. P. Ker or Eric Auerbach can match his knowledge, but they do not
quote so tellingly.
His own poetry meets the tests he proposed, but its style and rhythm can seem
too studied. Here is the conclusion to the pastoral elegy Thyrsis:
VICTORIAN ROMANTIC POETRY 279