Arnold, Wordsworth, and “Memorial Verses”

Abstract

ARNOLD, WORDSWORTH, AND “ MEMORIAL VERSES" HARVEY KERPNECK University of Toronto I n the essay on Wordsworth Arnold makes a famous distinction between higher and lower kinds of poetry. He has been working to discriminate the essence of Wordsworth's "superiority" in order that he might save his reputa­ tion for posterity from the ignorant neglect of the mass, on the one hand, and the meaningless idolatry of the "Wordsworthians," on the other. And he remarks that it is "the great and ample body of powerful work" that is left when an editor has pruned Wordsworth's luxuriance (his essay is an introduction to an anthology of selections from Wordsworth) that establishes this superiority. He goes on: Some kinds of poetry are in themselves lower kinds than others. The ballad kind is alower kind; the didactic kind, still more, is alower kind. Poetry of this latter sort counts, too, sometimes, by its biographical interest partly, not by its poetical interest pure and simple, but then this can only be when the poet producing it has the power and importance of Wordsworth.1 Arnold himself is such a poet, of course, and despite his strictures in his 1853 Preface against poetry in which the poet "allegorizes" the state of his own mind, it is a commonplace today that his most interesting poetry is his most subjective, self-concerned didactic poetry, poetry in which he describes more or less straightforwardly his spiritual dilemmas, ascribes causes to them, and prescribes remedies for them or notes analogous ills in his contemporaries. And one can discuss much of his total output in these terms; one can even "do something" with "Sohrab and Rustum" (father-son relationship) or “ The Forsaken Merman" (the buried life), for example. But with "Memorial Ver­ ses," Arnold's funeral tribute to Wordsworth, one should hesitate even to make the attempt. The poem, commissioned by Wordsworth's son-in-law, Edward Quillinan, and published in June 1850 in Fraser's Magazine, is only one of a number of tributes to Wordsworth in Arnold's prose and verse, but in concen­ tration, form, and polish, in intensity, it is the premier one. It does help us to see more clearly the roots of Arnold's view, later fully enunciated, that, as he puts it in his essay on Wordsworth, "poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to English Studies in Can ad a, ii, 2, Summer 1976 life." This view of poetry is implicit in the whole and in each part of "Memorial Verses." But the poem is not didactic in this sense-Arnold is neither expound­ ing a theory of poetry in it nor making an oblique comment on the situation of the poet in the mid-nineteenth century, especially the poet Matthew Arnold. He is attempting, as in the Wordsworth essay, to pay a tribute to Wordsworth which shall be a discriminating assessment, which shall be neither supercilious and condemnatory nor adulatory and fawning. The poem is a remarkable attempt to take a balanced view of Wordsworth in the midst of funeral passion for him (a passion which Arnold shares). And it is an attempt to do so according to those "law s" to which Arnold in his criticism pays so much obeisance, the "laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty."2 In other words, the poem is not didactic in a second sense either, that of being versified polemic almost indistinguishable from prose, as some of Arnold's lesser poetry of this same period is. It "says" a great deal about Wordsworth and Arnold's passion for him, but it does so at least as much by indirection as by direct statement, and it does so by exploiting much of the array of poetic rhetoric available to Arnold. The poem opens with a five-line introduction and general statement of the occasion and an indication of the method Arnold is to employ to assess Wordsworth for the age: Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron's struggle cease. But one such death remain'd to come; The last poetic voice is dumb...