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 wrong place
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 poetry of 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 bore the
tinge of melancholy born of 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 love in 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 well again!
For
then the night will more than pay
The
hopeless longing of the day.
And, when she comes he
bursts into rapturous wailings:
My
pent-up tears oppress my brain,
My
heart is swollen with love unsaid Ah let me weep and tell my
pain,
And
on thy shoulder rest my head.
But his is not the joy
of requited love and the canker is there in his divided aim:
Forgive
me! Forgive me!
Ah
Marguerite, fain
Would
these arms reach to clasp thee!
But
see! ‘tis in 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 back down
Singing:
“There dwells a loved one
But
cruel is she
The
kings 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,
The
stream, and do I linger here?
Ah,
shall I see thee, while a flush
Of
startled pleasure floods my brow,
Quick
through the oleanders brush
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.