“A Lost Pulse of Feeling”: Reconnecting with the “Hidden Self” in Matthew Arnold’s “Buried Life”

Abstract

Matthew Arnold’s “Buried Life” explores the desire for genuine human connection amidst the self-isolating impositions of his speaker’s society. It presents an image of a world so lacking in meaningful interaction that those who exist within it are bound to a restrictive state of half-life, disconnected as they are from the rest of humanity. While much of the critical discourse has viewed Arnold’s poem as little more than a woeful lament for an unattainable state of existence, this paper considers a reading in which the speaker has succeeded in moving beyond the bounds of his collective isolation and is optimistic of there being a manner in which others can do the same. In such a reading, the methodology for replicating the speaker’s success is gradually revealed throughout the text, and the plan which he proposes is a simple one. In order to unearth the life which has been “buried,” he suggests, in order to reconnect — however briefly — with that “lost pulse of feeling” from which so many have grown distant, all that is required is for the members of his society to communicate freely with one another about even their deepest, most “nameless feelings.”