'The Burden of Ourselves': Arnold as a Post-Romantic Poet

Abstract

This essay returns to the question of the response to the major English Romantic Poets, especially Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, made by Matthew Arnold in his poetry. It focuses on the doubleness and dividedness of this reponse, and it argues that Arnold wavers in an unstable but poetically productive way between seeking to establish his distance from Romantic poetry and conceding its hold over his imagination. The essay considers a range of poems by Arnold, including 'The Buried Life', Empedocles on Etna, 'Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse', 'The Scholar-Gipsy', 'Memorial Verses', 'A Summer Night', 'Dover Beach', and 'To Marguerite--Continued'. ********** Arnold's reaction to the English Romantic poets involves a dual response of recognition and redefinition; his poems engage in an inexhaustible dialogue with the work of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Sometimes he may seem to see 'all Romantic poetry' in terms of 'a psychology of expressive feeling', as Isobel Armstrong argues, against which he sets a would-be grand style. (1) But the work of the Romantic poets feeds copiously 'The central stream' of what Arnold, to use his own phrase, feels indeed. In describing that stream flowing 'below the surface-stream, shallow and light, Of what we say we feel', Arnold evokes a 'noiseless current strong, obscure and deep'. (2) In so doing, he calls to mind the Wordsworth for whom 'suffering' is 'permanent, obscure and dark, And shares the nature of infinity'. (3) The echo points up the complexity of Arnold's intertextual relations with the Romantics. Where 'infinity' prompts sublime intuitions of ultimate meaning for Wordsworth, the idea of the 'infinite' for Arnold throws up problems of unknowableness one associates more with the poetry of Byron or Shelley. It would be wrong to schematize Arnold's response to the Romantics as drawing on Wordsworth for solace, but on Shelley and Byron for images of quest. All the Romantics elicit strong, elusive responses from him. In 'The Scholar-Gipsy', for instance, Keats supplies Arnold with a vocabulary for a state of imaginative receptivity, as in the second and third stanzas, where Keatsian sensuousness provides an atmosphere conducive to the 'quest' for the scholargypsy. The 'quest' associates itself with the verb 'come': 'Come, shepherd, and again begin the quest!' (l. 10), Arnold writes; 'again begin' suggests a repeated attempt to return to a condition of simplicity associated, via 'Glanvil's book' (l. 31), with the seventeenth century, but linked, too, by way of the echoes of Keats, with a condition of imaginative surrender that is one aspect of English Romantic poetry. The scholar-gipsy 'came to Oxford and his friends no more' (l. 40), escaping 'the sick fatigue' (l. 164) known by Arnold, but which, as he also recognizes, Romantic poets, such as Shelley with his rejection in Adonais of 'the contagion of the world's slow stain' (l. 356), were conscious of as well. (4) In the elaborate simile with which the poem closes, 'dark Iberians come' (l. 249) to undo 'the corded bales' (l. 250) bequeathed by 'the grave Tyrian trader' (l. 232).The comparison's ramifying suggestions include the welcome extended by Arnold's poetry to the legacy of Romanticism. In 'The Buried Life', as in the earlier 'To Fausta', Arnold recalls Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' when he asserts: But often in the world's most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course. (ll. 45-50) 'But oft' (l. 25), Wordsworth declares, describing his gratitude for the memory of 'beauteous forms' (l. 22) in a syntactical pattern which Arnold borrows, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet. …