The poetry of Victorian masculinitiespoem. One of the ladies in the frame wishes that she were a "mighty
poetess" ("Prologue," 132); the "strange Poet-princess" (III. 255) has
written "awful odes" (I. 137) which her father wryly admits are "master-
pieces": "They mastered me" (II. 144-45), he quips. Ida mocks the Prince's
attempt at poetry ("O Swallow... / Fly to her... / And tell her... what I
tell to thee" [IV. 75-77]). In the end, womanly "Tenderness" (VII. 99) for
the Prince overcomes her discursive ferocity and the Princess becomes a
reader rather than a writer of poetry ("'Come down, O maid, from yonder
mountain height" [VII. 175-207]). By adding in 1850 the "songs" to the
1847 text, Tennyson stages the battle between the sexes as a contest
between lyric (feminine, maternal) and narrative (masculine, martial)
modes, with himself as the voice of both. His bigendered poetic persona
"move[s] as in a strange diagonal, / And maybe neither pleased myself nor
them" ("Conclusion," 27-28) - the audience both inside and outside of the
text.
Arnold often laments the passing of an ideal convergence between men
and women. The speakers in the group of lyrics called "Switzerland"
(1849) express alienation and loneliness that stem from a loss of the
moorings of Victorian masculinity. The male lover in "Isolation: To
Marguerite" had "faith" (MA 10) in the conventional domestic paradigm -
"I bade my heart .../... grow a home for only thee" (2, 4) - but, finding
his love unrequited, reluctantly resigns himself to "isolation without end"
(40). Apostrophizing not the beloved but his "lonely heart" (13), he
renounces "passions" (17) and tries to embrace "solitude" (18). Arnold
allegorizes the ineluctable separation between man and woman in terms of
a seascape in "To Marguerite - Continued": "Yes! in the sea of life enisled, /
With echoing straits between us thrown" (1-2), he declares, "We mortal
millions live alone" (4).
Arnold's representation of masculinity as a lost, unattainable, or even
repressive identity informs much of his poetry. He uses the dramatic
monologue to allow a male persona to express the full range of his
emotions to an implied female listener, thereby framing an unconventional
feminized masculinity within conventionally binary terms. "Fate" is taken
to task for dictating strict gender roles in "The Buried Life" (1852): the
speaker pleads for recognition of "The unregarded river of our life" (MA
39), specifically the "nameless feelings" (62) which men experience but
dare not express lest they be thought effeminate. The internal seascape of
"To Marguerite - Continued" becomes a "buried stream" (MA 42) of
emotions that "course on for ever unexpress'd" (63). Both men and women
possess a "hidden self" (65) but the male speaker focuses on his own need
for "a beloved hand" (78), a sympathetic exchange of glances, and "the
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