Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold

by Matthew Arnold

  That bugle-music on the breeze

  Arrests them with a charm’d surprise. 190

  Banner by turns and bugle woo:

  Ye shy recluses, follow too!

  O children, what do ye reply? —

  ‘Action and pleasure, will ye roam

  Through these secluded dells to cry 195

  And call us? but too late ye come!

  Too late for us your call ye blow

  Whose bent was taken long ago.

  ‘Long since we pace this shadow’d nave;

  We watch those yellow tapers shine, 200

  Emblems of hope over the grave,

  In the high altar’s depth divine;

  The organ carries to our ear

  Its accents of another sphere.

  ‘Fenced early in this cloistral round 205

  Of reverie, of shade, of prayer,

  How should we grow in other ground?

  How should we flower in foreign air?

  Pass, banners, pass, and bugles, cease!

  And leave our desert to its peace!’ 210

  Haworth Churchyard, April, 1855

  WHERE, under Loughrigg, the stream

  Of Rotha sparkles, the fields

  Are green, in the house of one

  Friendly and gentle, now dead,

  Wordsworth’s son-in-law, friend — 5

  Four years since, on a mark’d

  Evening, a meeting I saw.

  Two friends met there, two fam’d

  Gifted women. The one,

  Brilliant with recent renown, 10

  Young, unpractis’d, had told

  With a Master’s accent her feign’d

  Story of passionate life:

  The other, maturer in fame,

  Earning, she too, her praise 15

  First in Fiction, had since

  Widen’d her sweep, and survey’d

  History, Politics, Mind.

  They met, held converse: they wrote

  In a book which of glorious souls 20

  Held memorial: Bard,

  Warrior, Statesman, had left

  Their names: — chief treasure of all,

  Scott had consign’d there his last

  Breathings of song, with a pen 25

  Tottering, a death-stricken hand.

  I beheld; the obscure

  Saw the famous. Alas!

  Years in number, it seem’d

  Lay before both, and a fame 30

  Heighten’d, and multiplied power.

  Behold! The elder, to-day,

  Lies expecting from Death,

  In mortal weakness, a last

  Summons: the younger is dead. 35

  First to the living we pay

  Mournful homage: the Muse

  Gains not an earth-deafen’d ear.

  Hail to the steadfast soul,

  Which, unflinching and keen, 40

  Wrought to erase from its depth

  Mist, and illusion, and fear!

  Hail to the spirit which dar’d

  Trust its own thoughts, before yet

  Echoed her back by the crowd! 45

  Hail to the courage which gave

  Voice to its creed, ere the creed

  Won consecration from Time!

  Turn, O Death, on the vile,

  Turn on the foolish the stroke 50

  Hanging now o’er a head

  Active, beneficent, pure!

  But, if the prayer be in vain —

  But, if the stroke must fall —

  Her, whom we cannot save, 55

  What might we say to console?

  She will not see her country lose

  Its greatness, nor the reign of fools prolong’d.

  She will behold no more

  This ignominious spectacle, 60

  Power dropping from the hand

  of paralytic factions, and no soul

  To snatch and wield it: will not see

  Her fellow people sit

  Helplessly gazing on their own decline. 65

  Myrtle and rose fit the young,

  Laurel and oak the mature.

  Private affections, for these,

  Have run their circle, and left

  Space for things far from themselves, 70

  Thoughts of the general weal,

  Country, and public cares:

  Public cares, which move

  Seldom and faintly the depth

  Of younger passionate souls 75

  Plung’d in themselves, who demand

  Only to live by the heart,

  Only to love and be lov’d.

  How shall we honour the young,

  The ardent, the gifted? how mourn? 80

  Console we cannot; her ear

  Is deaf. Far northward from here,

  In a churchyard high mid the moors

  Of Yorkshire, a little earth

  Stops it for ever to praise. 85

  Where, behind Keighley, the road

  Up to the heart of the moors

  Between heath-clad showery hills

  Runs, and colliers’ carts

  Poach the deep ways coming down, 90

  And a rough, grim’d race have their homes —

  There, on its slope, is built

  The moorland town. But the church

  Stands on the crest of the hill,

  Lonely and bleak; at its side 95

  The parsonage-house and the graves.

  See! in the desolate house

  The childless father! Alas —

  Age, whom the most of us chide,

  Chide, and put back, and delay — 100

  Come, unupbraided for once!

  Lay thy benumbing hand,

  Gratefully cold, on this brow!

  Shut out the grief, the despair!

  Weaken the sense of his loss! 105

  Deaden the infinite pain!

  Another grief I see,

  Younger: but this the Muse,

  In pity and silent awe

  Revering what she cannot soothe, 110

  With veil’d face and bow’d head,

  Salutes, and passes by.

  Strew with roses the grave

  Of the early-dying. Alas!

  Early she goes on the path 115

  To the Silent Country, and leaves

  Half her laurels unwon,

  Dying too soon: yet green

  Laurels she had, and a course

  Short, but redoubled by Fame. 120

  For him who must live many years

  That life is best which slips away

  Out of the light, and mutely; which avoids

  Fame, and her less-fair followers, Envy, Strife,

  Stupid Detraction, Jealousy, Cabal, 125

  Insincere Praises: — which descends

  The mossy quiet track to Age.

  But, when immature Death

  Beckons too early the guest

  From the half-tried Banquet of Life, 130

  Young, in the bloom of his days;

  Leaves no leisure to press,

  Slow and surely, the sweet

  Of a tranquil life in the shade —

  Fuller for him be the hours! 135

  Give him emotion, though pain!

  Let him live, let him feel, I have liv’d.

  Heap up his moments with life!

  Quicken his pulses with Fame!

  And not friendless, nor yet 140

  Only with strangers to meet,

  Faces ungreeting and cold,

  Thou, O Mourn’d One, to-day

  Enterest the House of the Grave.

  Those of thy blood, whom thou lov’dst, 145

  Have preceded thee; young,

  Loving, a sisterly band:

  Some in gift, some in art

  Inferior; all in fame.

  They, like friends, shall receive 150

  This comer, greet her with joy;

  Welcome the Sister, the Friend;

  Hear with delight of thy fame.

&
nbsp; Round thee they lie; the grass

  Blows from their graves toward thine. 155

  She, whose genius, though not

  Puissant like thine, was yet

  Sweet and graceful: and She —

  (How shall I sing her?) — whose soul

  Knew no fellow for might, 160

  Passion, vehemence, grief,

  Daring, since Byron died,

  That world-fam’d Son of Fire; She, who sank

  Baffled, unknown, self-consum’d;

  Whose too bold dying song 165

  Shook, like a clarion-blast, my soul.

  Of one too I have heard,

  A Brother — sleeps he here? —

  Of all his gifted race

  Not the least gifted; young, 170

  Unhappy, beautiful; the cause

  Of many hopes, of many tears.

  O Boy, if here thou sleep’st, sleep well!

  On thee too did the Muse

  Bright in thy cradle smile: 175

  But some dark Shadow came

  (I know not what) and interpos’d.

  Sleep, O cluster of friends,

  Sleep! or only, when May,

  Brought by the West Wind, returns 180

  Back to your native heaths,

  And the plover is heard on the moors,

  Yearly awake, to behold

  The opening summer, the sky,

  The shining moorland; to hear 185

  The drowsy bee, as of old,

  Hum o’er the thyme, the grouse

  Call from the heather in bloom:

  Sleep; or only for this

  Break your united repose. 190

  To Marguerite I

  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:

  Nor fear’d but thy love likewise grew, 5

  Like mine, each day more tried, more true.

  The fault was grave: I might have known,

  What far too soon, alas, I learn’d —

  The heart can bind itself alone,

  And faith is often unreturn’d. — 10

  Self-sway’d our feelings ebb and swell:

  Thou lov’st no more: Farewell! Farewell!

  Farewell! and thou, thou lonely heart,

  Which never yet without remorse

  Even for a moment did’st depart 15

  From thy remote and spherèd course

  To haunt the place where passions reign,

  Back to thy solitude again!

  Back, with the conscious thrill of shame

  Which Luna felt, that summer night, 20

  Flash through her pure immortal frame,

  When she forsook the starry height

  To hang over Endymion’s sleep

  Upon the pine-grown Latmian steep; —

  Yet she, chaste Queen, had never prov’d 25

  How vain a thing is mortal love,

  Wandering in Heaven, far remov’d.

  But thou hast long had place to prove

  This truth — to prove, and make thine own:

  Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone. 30

  Or, if not quite alone, yet they

  Which touch thee are unmating things —

  Ocean, and Clouds, and Night, and Day;

  Lorn Autumns and triumphant Springs;

  And life, and others’ joy and pain, 35

  And love, if love, of happier men.

  Of happier men — for they, at least,

  Have dream’d two human hearts might blend

  In one, and were through faith releas’d

  From isolation without end 40

  Prolong’d, nor knew, although not less

  Alone than thou, their loneliness.

  To Marguerite II

  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:

  Nor fear’d but thy love likewise grew, 5

  Like mine, each day more tried, more true.

  The fault was grave: I might have known,

  What far too soon, alas, I learn’d —

  The heart can bind itself alone,

  And faith is often unreturn’d. — 10

  Self-sway’d our feelings ebb and swell:

  Thou lov’st no more: Farewell! Farewell!

  Farewell! and thou, thou lonely heart,

  Which never yet without remorse

  Even for a moment did’st depart 15

  From thy remote and spherèd course

  To haunt the place where passions reign,

  Back to thy solitude again!

  Back, with the conscious thrill of shame

  Which Luna felt, that summer night, 20

  Flash through her pure immortal frame,

  When she forsook the starry height

  To hang over Endymion’s sleep

  Upon the pine-grown Latmian steep; —

  Yet she, chaste Queen, had never prov’d 25

  How vain a thing is mortal love,

  Wandering in Heaven, far remov’d.

  But thou hast long had place to prove

  This truth — to prove, and make thine own:

  Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone. 30

  Or, if not quite alone, yet they

  Which touch thee are unmating things —

  Ocean, and Clouds, and Night, and Day;

  Lorn Autumns and triumphant Springs;

  And life, and others’ joy and pain, 35

  And love, if love, of happier men.

  Of happier men — for they, at least,

  Have dream’d two human hearts might blend

  In one, and were through faith releas’d

  From isolation without end 40

  Prolong’d, nor knew, although not less

  Alone than thou, their loneliness.

  MEROPE. A TRAGEDY

  Arnold was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857 and was the first to deliver his lectures in English rather than Latin. Arnold developed important ideas in social and religious criticism, leading him to later tour the United States, delivering lectures on education, democracy and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

  In 1858 Arnold published his tragedy Merope, which was “calculated”, he wrote to a friend, “rather to inaugurate my Professorship with dignity than to move deeply the present race of humans,” and the poetic drama was chiefly remarkable for its experiments in irregular metres.

  The tragedy concerns the eponymous Queen of Messenia, a character from Greek mythology, who was the daughter of King Cypselus of Arcadia and the wife of Cresphontes, the Heraclid king of Messenia. After the murder of her husband and her two older children by Polyphontes, Merope was forced to marry the murderer, but she managed to save her youngest son Aepytus, whom she sent secretly to Aetolia. Several years later, when Aepytus grew up, he killed Polyphontes with the collaboration of Merope, and he took revenge for the murder of his relatives and the insult to his mother.

  Arnold, c. 1870

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Historical Introduction

  Merope

  Preface

  But however the case may be with regard to the curiosity of the public, I have long had the strongest desire to attempt, for my own satisfaction, to come to closer quarters with the form which produces such grand effects in the hands of the Greek masters; to try to obtain, through the medium of a living, familiar language, a fuller and more intense feeling of that beauty, which, even when apprehended through the medium of a dead language, so powerfully affected me. In his delightful Life of Goethe, Mr. Lewes has most truly observed that Goethe’s Iphigeneia enjoys an inestimable advantage in being written in a language which, being a modern language, is in some sort our own. Not only is it vain to expect that the vast majority of mankind will ever undertake the toil of mastering a dead language, above all, a dead lang
uage so difficult as the Greek; but it may be doubted whether even those, whose enthusiasm shrinks from no toil, can ever so thoroughly press into the intimate feeling of works composed in a dead language as their enthusiasm would desire.

  I desired to try, therefore, how much of the effectiveness of the Greek poetical forms I could retain in an English poem constructed under the conditions of those forms; of those forms, too, in their severest and most definite expression, in their application to dramatic poetry.

  I thought at first that I might accomplish my object by a translation of one of the great works of Aeschylus or Sophocles. But a translation is a work not only inferior to the original by the whole difference of talent between the first composer and his translator: it is even inferior to the best which the translator could do under more inspiring circumstances. No man can do his best with a subject which does not penetrate him: no man can be penetrated by a subject which he does not conceive independently.

  Should I take some subject on which we have an extant work by one of the great Greek poets, and treat it independently? Something was to be said for such a course: in antiquity, the same tragic stories were handled by all the tragic poets: Voltaire says truly that to see the same materials differently treated by different poets is most interesting; accordingly, we have an Oedipus of Corneille, an Oedipus of Voltaire: innumerable are the Agamemnons, the Electras, the Antigones, of the French and Italian poets from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. But the same disadvantage which we have in translating clings to us in our attempt to treat these subjects independently: their treatment by the ancient masters is so overwhelmingly great and powerful that we can henceforth conceive them only as they are there treated: an independent conception of them has become impossible for us: in working upon them we are still, therefore, subject to conditions under which no man can do his best.

  It remained to select a subject from among those which had been considered to possess the true requisites of good tragic subjects; on which great works had been composed, but had not survived to chill emulation by their grandeur. Of such subjects there is, fortunately, no lack. In the writings of Hyginus, a Latin mythographer of uncertain date, we possess a large stock of them. The heroic stories in Hyginus, Maffei, the reformer of the Italian theatre, imagined rightly or wrongly to be the actual summaries of lost Greek dramas: they are, at any rate, subjects on which lost dramas were founded. Maffei counsels the poets of his nation to turn from the inferior subjects on which they were employing themselves, to this ‘miniera di tragici argomenti,’ this rich mine of subjects for tragedy. Lessing, the great German critic, echoes Maffei’s counsel, but adds a warning. ‘Yes,’ he cries, ‘the great subjects are there, but they await an intelligent eye to regard them: they can be handled, not by the great majority of poets, but only by the small minority.’