Abstract
ONE OF THE PIECES particularly admired by initial readers of Matthew Arnold’s first volumes of poetry was ‘The Sick King in Bokhara’ (1849). ‘[M]ost pleasing to the ordinary mind’, said The Times on 4 November 1853;1 ‘one of the wisest, most simple, and most genial of the poems’,2 added Fraser’s Magazine the following year. The story on which the poem—probably written in 1847 or 1848?3—is based is told in Alexander Burnes’s Travels into Bokhara (1834).4 It concerns the King of Bokhara who tries, generously, to overturn the death penalty handed down to a strict Muslim who had in some way violated the law. But the guilty man will have none of the King’s attempts at mercy and is slain at his own demand, even though the King instructs his executioners to allow him to escape if he makes the attempt. The King weeps over the...
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