matthew bevis
some truth in this distinction, but it should also be noted that the celebrations of
classicalepic are themselves equivocal. When Arnold in his Preface advocated a
return to the classical simplicity of the Greek tradition and style as an escape from
the luxuriant disease of modernity, he prescribed an avoidance of ‘contemporary
allusions’ and an emphasis on ‘action’ rather than on appeals to ‘our transient
feelings and interests’.^21 The work that was meant to exemplify these critical
principles wasSohrab and Rustum(1853), and—as many contemporary reviewers
noted—the poem frequently borrowed from the structure and the style of the
Iliad. Yet, Arnold’s borrowings give voice not to a Homeric championing of war,
but to that side of Homer that Simone Weil so sensitively described. Speaking of
‘those few luminous moments, scattered here and there throughout the poem’,
Weil observes:
The tradition of hospitality persists, even through several generations, to dispel the blindness
of combat....[M]oments of grace are rare in theIliad, but they are enough to make us
feel with sharp regret what it is that violence has killed and will kill again...Whatever is
not war, whatever war destroys or threatens, theIliadwraps in poetry; the realities of war,
never.^22
Weil notes that ‘the brief evocations of the world of peace are felt as pain’,^23 and
these evocations are at the heart of Arnold’s debt to Homer. When Rustum mortally
wounds his son Sohrab, the latter lies dying and announces that he pities his mother
for her loss. As Rustum listens, combat gives way to thoughts of hospitality:
he listened, plunged in thought:
And his soul set to grief, as the vast tide
Of the bright rocking Ocean sets to shore
At the full moon; tears gathered in his eyes;
For he remembered his early youth,
And all its bounding rapture; as, at dawn,
The shepherd from his mountain-lodge descries
A far, bright city, smitten by the sun,
Through many rolling clouds—so Rustum saw
His youth; saw Sohrab’s mother, in her bloom;
And that old king, her father, who loved well
His wandering guest, and gave him his fair child
With joy; and all the pleasant life they led,
They three, in that long-distant summer-time...^24The first simile makes grief feel like a homecoming, as if grief itself were a source of
rest to a mind that has for so long attempted to resist it. The second, in comparing
the warrior to the shepherd, evokes a dream of the pastoral world in which the only
(^21) Arnold, ‘Preface’, 657 and 659.
(^22) Simone Weil,The Iliad, or The Poem of Force, trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, Pa.: Pendle
Hill, 1956), 27, 29, 31.
(^23) Ibid. 31. (^24) Arnold,Sohrab and Rustum,inPoems of Matthew Arnold, 345–6.