Love-Poems of Matthew

LOVE-POEMS OF MATTHEW ARNOLD

By Prof. AMARESH DATTA, M.A., Ph.D.
(Department of English, University of Saugor)

Even among the acknowledged admirers of Matthew Arnold, there do not seem to be many who could praise Arnold; the poet, in unequivocal terms. While all of them speak about his poetry in guarded language and invariably with a strong mental reservation, not a few of them either lay the emphasis on the wrongplace or extol the critic, both of literature and life, at the cost of the poet. This has done Arnold, the poet, quite a bit of harm, for the common readers today are generally guided by critics in matters of taste, and criticism is like the seasonal wind that seldom changes its direction.

Arnold, the poet, I feel, did never have a chance. In his days, the most formidable of his contemporaries held the reading public in exclusive loyalty to them by the broad appeal of their poetry, their compromising idealism, and a kind of gay optimism that came pat in an age which had begun to grope in the darkness. And in our age a fresh reading of, and an intimate personal acquaintance with, his poetry is not very much encouraged by the critical utterances about it. So he has not been, nor perhaps can ever be, a subject of the proverbial revivalism in literature, simply because he was neither accepted with warmth and enthusiasm nor discarded with any passionate vehemence. Yet with his philosophic scepticism, and his perception of a fast-fading faith and the sick hurry and divided aims of the modern man, his poetry should have made an impressive appeal to our generation. But, as it is it was too refined and subtle for the complacent Victorians and, for our experimenting age, perhaps too traditional in its technical perfection.

My concern, however, is with the love-poems of Mathew Arnold, and I have deemed it necessary to concentrate on them for two specific and important reasons. First, all the salient features and his peculiar poetic trait can be abundantly traced in them, and secondly his love-poems form a class by themselves, though they have not been hitherto acknowledged as such and properly analysed. Mr. Herbert Read, for instance, who has made a detailed study of the love-poems in English literature, has not mentioned Matthew Arnold among the poets, or any of his poems as belonging to this particular genre.

Love may be of various kinds but it is the poetryof passionate or sexual love that is the subject of our discussion, for Arnold’s love-poems are poems of passionate love. And be it said at the outset that ‘unique’ is the word for his poems of love.

In spite of the elemental nature of this passion of love, it has been treated differently by poets in different ages and the approach to it has been as varied as lovers themselves. Yet the treatment has been as much personal as collective or periodical. What is noticeable is that in particular ages poets felt in certain specific ways till it last even the love-poems, the most personal of poetic utterances, hardened into rigid forms or fashionable cliches. That means environment, no less than poetic patterns, imageries, phrases etc., has considerably determined the character of the love-poems of the different ages. And it is for this reason that poems written on the same subject can be so easily classified.

From the early sixteenth to almost the end of the seventeenth century, there had been a rich and abundant flow of love-lyrics in English literature. For sheer variety and passionate fervour, for overflowing joy of satiety and wailing pang of separation, and, above all, for an uninhibited and spontaneous expression of amorous feelings and subtle and sometimes profound thought born thereof, which were possible only in an age of new awakening and wide humanism, these poems even today stand as admirable examples of poems of passionate love. There was the influence of Petrarch, the poets of the Plieade school, and even of Dante, but there were certain traits, turned indigenous through experience, deeply-felt longings and joys and despair; the colourful sensuousness of Spenser, the deep and embroidered raptures of Shakespeare along with his dark and disillusioning thoughts, the luscious fervour of Ben Jonson, as also the quaint earthliness of Donne. Here are some examples:

Amorous ecstasy of Spenser:

Tell me ye merchants’ daughters, did ye see
So fair a creature in your town before,
So sweet, so lovely, and so mild as she
Adorned with beauty’s grace and virtue’s store?
Her goodly eyes like sapphires shining bright
Her forehead ivory white etc. etc;

Shakespeare’s uplifting joy:

When……
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,–and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising,
From sullen earth) sings hymns at Heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

And his illusion:

What potions have I drunk of siren tears,
Distill’d from limbecs foul as hell within,
Applying fears to hopes and hopes to fears,
Still losing when I saw myself to win!
or
For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright
Who are as black as hell, as dark as night.

And his recurrent cry of caution:

Be moderate, my Love.

Ben Jonson’s lusty invocation:

Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup
And I will not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise,
Doth ask a drink divine
But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.

And lastly Donne’s passionate frenzy:

But we will have a way more liberal
Than changing hearts, to join them; so we shall
Be one, and one another’s all.
or
So, so break off this last lamenting kiss,
Which sucks two souls, and vapours both away.

The examples cited above will give an idea of traditional love-poems in English. But all this was over with the close of the seventeenth century. Throughout the entire eighteenth century, Burns excepted, practically none wrote love-lyrics retaining in them deep sincerity of feeling and the eager ecstasy of love, for it was not merely an age of satire and prose but also of a kind of affected restraint both in form and content, style and subject-matter. The nineteenth century saw a rejuvenation. In her second youth, lusty and formidable, poetry again began to walk in her pristine glory. It is, of course, a fact that some of the great poets of the age did not write love-poems at all or wrote them indifferently; yet, for an anthology of love-lyrics, some of the finest specimens will have to be chosen from this age, including even that extract from Wordsworth’s ‘Vaudracour and Julia,’ beginning with “Arabian fiction never filled the world, etc.” Shelley’s over-spiritualising and over-etherealising of this most earthly of human emotions may leave one cold, but in Browning there is love’s plenty. His love-poems are varied, deep, grotesque and always very strongly moving.

With Arnold we enter a new phase. Browning’s love experience was happy and he could give himself up without reservation to the power of love, for which his poems could sustain the freshness and fervour of the uncontaminated lover. But Arnold was torn between sophistication and a passionate but vain desire for a direct and simple, living, spontaneous and sensuous joy. The son of the Headmaster of Rugby, the serious scholar of classical literature, the inspector of schools, the professor of English poetry and the fastidious critic of life and literature could never forget the duality of his nature, the other side of his character which strove to be simple, sensuous and impassioned. In fact his crusade against society is a battle against himself, a product of that artificial and sophisticated society. His poetry therefore is the poetry of self-pity, self-commiseration.

Thus when Browning says:

Just when I seemed about to learn!
Where is the thread now? off again!
The old trick! only I discern–
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn…..

one knows that it is of the inherent tragedy of love realised through intense personal experience, and limitations of the human comprehension that he speaks. But when Arnold reflects:

Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow
And then their endless bounds they know.

or, when he wavers:
Again I spring to make my choice
Again in tones of ire
I hear a god’s tremendous voice
“Be counselled and retire”.

or yet again when he laments:

We were apart, yet day by day,
I bade my heart more constant be,
I bade it keep the world away
And grow a home for only thee.

one knows where to trace the cause of this disappointment. It is the outside world, the god of that world and the entire civilisation that stand between himself and his beloved and trample all his promptings down. In this tragedy of love, society seems to be both destiny and villian.

Arnold’s love experience was over by 1850, and the spring of his poetry since then gradually began to dry up, and whatever he wrote thereafter borethe tinge of melancholy bornof this disappointment in love. I for one feel inclined to believe that the eternal note of sadness in his poetry is not a streak of world sorrow but an intensely personal factor. Mr. Trilling rightly maintains that, in Arnold, “the avid lust for life and youth, and the desire for maturity which seems to Arnold to imply giving up all that youth means, live side by side.” And it is his ultimate surrender to the objective and academic approach to life that gradually killed the poet in him.

Yet he began well. All his love-poems written in that period of intense and shattering experience, throb and glow with deep passion. The question whether he had one or two beloveds, whether he composed some of these poems on Marguerite and some on ‘Urania’ who stands for Frances Lucy Wightman whom he married in 1851, or whether the French Marguerite was a paid companion or a chambermaid, lower in social status than he was, or a French aristocrat–a question which has been debated by many and since a long time–need not detain us here, for it is not important in the present context. Nor should we try to find the reason why Arnold kept quiet on questions about Marguerite, asked by his grandchildren in his old age. But one thing comes out clear from this maze of views,–that Arnold had longed for girl passionately, loved her with all the intensity of youth, then separated from her almost for the same reason which constrained him to bid good-bye to poetry, and then later in life in his ruminating moments pined for her and the irrepressible memory of their lovein order to give it a ‘shadowy durability’.

As illustrative of this love-episode I shall here quote from the poems composed in the midst and round about this affair, though some of them were published much later and on different dates.

His longing began in this passionate strain:

Come to me in my dreams and then
By day I shall be wellagain!
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.

And, when she comes he bursts intorapturous wailings:

My pent-up tears oppress my brain,
My heart is swollen with love unsaid Ahletme weep and tellmy pain,
And on thy shoulder rest my head.

But his is not the joy of requited loveand the canker is there in his divided aim:

Forgive me! Forgive me!
Ah Marguerite, fain
Would these arms reach to clasp thee!
But see! ‘tisin vain.
In the void air, towards thee,
My stretch’d arms are cast;
But a sea rolls between us
Our different past!

For, Each day brings its petty dust
Our soon-choked souls to fill,
And we forget because we must
And not because we will.

So in bitter agony he cries:

Who order’d that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?
Who renders vain their deep desire?
A God a god their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.

But the fault is not inherent in human nature; it is in Arnold himself, nor is Marguerite’s devotion or fidelity questioned as some critics would have us believe, for:

I too have suffer’d; yet I know
She is not cold, though she seems so.
…..Yet she could love those eyes declare,
Were but men nobler than they are.

If separation is inevitable, and to Arnold it is so, for:

Each to his own strict line we move
And some find death ere they find love
So far apart their lives are thrown
From the twin soul which halves their own.

And if:

Vain is the effort to forget,

Then

Me let no half-effaced memories cumber!
Fled, fled at once be all vestige of thee!
Deep be the darkness and still be the slumber,–
Dead be the past and its phantoms to me
Then when we meet and thy look strays toward me,
Scanning my face and the changes wrought there:
Who, let me say, is this stranger regards me
With the grey eyes and the lovely brown hair?

So even when the affair is over, she is not altogether lost to him. He hopes to meet her again, and in moments of deep despair invokes her memory to hover round and sustain him:

Ah love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy nor love nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Yet he cannot live by memory alone, and the passionate yearning of the forsaken merman is an unmistakable echo of Arnold’s pining heart and a symbolic projection of his own deep despair:

Call her once before you go
Call once yet
In a voice that she will know
Marguret! Marguret!
...We will gaze from the sand hills
At the white sleeping town;
At the church on the hill side–
And then come down
Singing: “There dwells a lovedone
But cruel is she

She left lonely for ever

Thekings of the sea.”

The unadorned and sometimes even unpoetic simplicity of language speaks of a deep personal experience, for such intense sincerity seldom tends to be poetically poetic or studiedly ornate. Poetry here is identified with life. All his passion for the sustained beauty of classical literature seems to be eclipsed by the over-mastering passion of love. And the sea is a recurring symbol of life in Arnold’s poetry. However, separation was inevitable. With his drifting mind he could not be passionately faithful to the beloved of his youth. Hence this fretting against the inevitable, hence this groping for the place where to lay the blame. The swan-song of this love was sung in a poem composed ten years later:

Ten years! and to my waking eye
Once more the roofs of Berne appear;
The rocky banks, the terrace high,
Thestream, and do I linger here?
Ah, shall I see thee, while a flush
Of startled pleasure floods my brow,
Quick through the oleanders brush

And clasp thy hands, and cry: ‘Tis Thou!

Like driftwood spars, which meet and pass

Upon the boundless ocean-plain,

So on the sea of life, alas!

Man meets man–meets and quits again.

 

I knew it when my life was young

I feel it still, now youth is o’er

The mists are on the mountain hung,

And Marguerite I shall see no more.

Besides these direct lyric utterances of love there is the narative of Tristram and Iseult, which bears a close resemblance his own love experience. This was published in 1852 in the volume entitled ‘Empedocles on Etna and other Poems,’ where also appeared most of his love-lyrics for the first time. Though the reference here is rather oblique, the symbolic implication seems to be revealing–the choice of this particular story at this particular stage of his life and his handling of the subject, –his emphasis on the amorous longing of Tristram and the abrogation of the heroic element do not leave any doubt about it. And even a casual reader will not fail to observe that Arnold chose this subject not so much for the story as for giving expression to a deeply felt personal feeling, or that because of its symbolic significance in his mind he failed to write a coherent and complete narrative poem,–it being: only a collection of magnificent love rhapsodies in verse. Arnold’s pining for Marguerite even after his marriage is echoed vividly in the story of Tristram and the two Iseults, the one whom he married and the other whom he passionately desired to the very end of his life. His tragedy here has assumed a new complexity. It is not only the world outside but also his wife as a symbol of the responsibilities of social life that stand between him and his Marguerite. Yes, Arnold is Tristram. Visualising an all-too-late meeting with the queen of his heart, it was as if Arnold, not Tristram, cried:

Raise the light, my page, that I may see her,–
Thou art come at last then, haughty queen!
Long I’ve waited, long I’ve fought my fever:
Late thou comest, cruel thou hast been.

But Marguerite did not actually come and Arnold sang of that despair in a poem composed ten years later, to which I have already referred.

Such are the scope and nature of this tragedy of love. To a modern it has for obvious reasons a special appeal. The growing consciousness of the tyranny of the external world has killed much of the poetry of our age. Had he not spoken directly and through traditional images, he would have been the first Prufrock of English poetry.

Arnold’s Marguerite had long vanished into the air, thin air, but she left behind for him a trail of melancholy from which he never recovered. She had taken away with her much of his joy, much of his poetry as well, but ultimately bequeathed to him a calm of mind and a deep understanding of himself and the life around him:

I say, fear not! Life still
Leaves human effort scope
But since life teems with ill;
Nurse no extravagant hope;
Because thou must not dream, thou needst not then despair.

I can see Marguerite presiding over these lines.