‘YES: IN THE SEA OF LIFE’

Abstract

T HE poem of which these are the opening words' has been more often singled out by critics for superlative praise than any other poem of Arnold's. Already in 1867 Swinburne could refer to it as 'the famous verses, cited and admired even by critics sparing of their priceless praise';2z to Saintsbury in 19o8 it is simply 'Mr. Arnold's finest poem by far'.3 In the belief that some part of the poem's power consists in its waking of echoes from our reading, and that these also lay within Arnold's reading, I have collected some of these and attempted to relate them to the poem. (Of some that have escaped notice in print I believe many readers, especially nineteenth-century readers, to have been at least half-aware.) These are presented not in any foolish confidence of completeness, or of a new illumination of the poem. I am moved partly by dissatisfaction with what has been previously written about the poem, not only with the vagueness of eulogy but often with the stated or suggested views of its themes, and with such comment as there has been on parallels and sources. The last two are found in interdependence. Sometimes a too simple view of its themes has provoked undue emphasis on a single parallel. When John Duke Coleridge in an early review4 charged Arnold with imitation of a passage in Christabel, he was under-interpreting the poem as well as (not quite disinterestedly) imputing a wrong or over-conscious motive. When Saintsbury alined the