fighting talk thing that smites is the sun (‘smitten’ here, with its suggestion of being enamoured,
servesto bathe martial action in romantic yearning). Both similes are lingering
dreams—precarious digressions from therealization that awaits the father, forlorn
attempts to stay the flow of the action, for it is action that has brought the losses
Rustum contemplates. These similes are emblems of the luxuriant modern style that
Arnold wished to avoid, and such luxuries (and the brooding which accompanies
them) frequently punctuateSohrab and Rustum, turning it into a ‘modern’ poem
in its willingness to dwell on ‘the dialogue of the mind with itself’ that war can
produce. Indeed, the setting of the poem (two armies of Eastern troops, the Tartars
and the Persians, face each other on the plains of the Oxus) is not as remote from
‘contemporary allusions’ and ‘transient feelings and interests’ as Arnold might wish
to suggest. As Isobel Armstrong notes: ‘what could be more modern than this?
The historical context of Arnold’s writing was the collapse of the Ottoman empire,
the insecure status of Afghanistan and the new alignments of Britain, France and
Russia,thenineteenth-century problem. The Crimean war was two years away, but
the eastern question already cast shadows at the beginning of the 1850s.’^25 Those
shadows can be glimpsed inSohrab and Rustum, a poem chastened by its own
mixed allegiances, and enriched by its debt to a classical tradition that dwelt on the
cost as well as the honour of war.
The fertile ambiguities of Arnold’s principles and practice cast their own shadows
across the writing of the period, and the Crimean War was not one of those
contemporary events or transient interests that poets felt themselves at liberty to
pass over. In many ways, the Crimean conflict was a new kind of war. It was the
first time that commissioned war artists accompanied a British army into the field,
and the first conflict of European military powers to be recorded by camera. These
developments encouraged a verisimilitude in battle painting and other genres,
fostering a shift from older heroic depictionsto a more realistic portrayal of the
battlefield.^26 The war was also the first to make use of the telegraph, and to call
upon the art of the war correspondent (unlike those in the Great War, these
correspondents were subject to very little censorship^27 ). William Howard Russell,
correspondent forThe Times, proclaimed: ‘The only thing the partisans of misrule
can allege is that we don’t ‘‘make things pleasant’’ to the authorities, and that, amid
the filth and starvation and deadly stagnation of the camp, we did not go about
‘‘babbling of green fields’’, of present abundance, and of prospects of victory.’^28
Much of Russell’s writing sets itself against babble, and reads like a description
ofthefrontlineintheFirstWorldWar:‘theskiesareblackasink—thewindis
(^25) Isobel Armstrong,Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics(London: Routledge, 1993), 216.
(^26) See Matthew Paul Lalumia,Realism and Politics in Victorian Art of the Crimean War(Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press, 1984).
(^27) See Andrew Lambert and Stephen Badsey,The War Correspondents: The Crimean War(Stroud:
Alan Sutton, 1994). 28
William Howard Russell, inThe Times, 12 Feb. 1855, 9.