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Selected Poems
"Bloomsbury Poetry Classics" are selections from the work of some of our greatest poets. The series is aimed at the general reader rather than the specialist and carries no critical or explanatory apparatus. This can be found elsewhere. In the series the poems introduce themselves, on an uncluttered page and in a format that is both attractive and convenient. The selections have been made by the distinguished poet, critic and biographer Ian Hamilton. Matthew Arnold was born in 1822, the eldest son of Thomas Arnold, the fabled headmaster of Rugby. In his early life, Arnold struggled to cope with the benign domination of his father's early death, and with the "terrible notions of duty" he felt himself to have inherited. After securing a reputation with poems like "The Scholar Gypsy", "Suhrab and Rostum" and "Dover Beach", Arnold in 1869 more or less abandoned poetry and turned his attention to the educational, critical and cultural writings which have proved so influential in this century. Arnold died in 1888.
128 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1886
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About the author
Matthew Arnold
1,362 books176 followersPoems, such as "Dover Beach" (1867), of British critic Matthew Arnold express moral and religious doubts alongside his
Culture and Anarchy
, a polemic of 1869 against Victorian materialism.
Matthew Arnold, an English sage writer, worked as an inspector of schools. Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of rugby school, fathered him and and Tom Arnold, his brother and literary professor, alongside William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew...
Matthew Arnold, an English sage writer, worked as an inspector of schools. Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of rugby school, fathered him and and Tom Arnold, his brother and literary professor, alongside William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew...
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 30, 2023
It's short, shorter than the other poems I have to read for this week, so it was bearable to put up with. And it was at least a little better than most of the poems I've been forced to read these past few weeks.
December 13, 2020
Again I see my bliss at hand,
The town, the lake are here ;
My Marguerite smiles upon the strand,
Unalter'd with the year.
I know that graceful figure fair,
That cheek of languid hue ;
I know that soft, enkerchief'd hair
And those sweet eyes of blue.
Again I spring to make my choice ;
Again in tones of ire
I hear God's tremendous voice :
"Be counsell'd, and retire."
Ye guiding Powers who join and part,
What would ye have with me?
Ah, warn some more ambitious heart.
And let the peaceful be !
July 23, 2021
When it comes to poetry, I err on the side of treating it with too much respect. Especially with older poets - who, like their compatriots in fiction, treated form with more deference - I’m inclined to think that because it’s hard to do, it must be good.
I can now see that this is somewhat of a flawed premise. Obviously not all poetry can be good, even if it’s old. Far more books were written in the nineteenth century than those by Eliot, Austen, Brontës 1-3, and Dickens, yet they don’t survive on in the collective reading consciousness. Why? They were zeitgeisty rather than good. They were copies, not originals. They provided ‘more of the same’ instead of obeying any internal drive. In short, they were what I suspect the crop of things I rate one-star among the publications of recent years will eventually become. (Obviously, my opinion is the one that matters … in my opinion.)
All of which is to say, that Matthew Arnold wrote half a good poem (On Dover Beach) and the rest of his output is forgettable. I glazed over while reading it, and retain only a brief sense that the poems were own-brand copies of the most boring bits of Byron, Pope, and Coleridge.
From ‘Switzerland’:
“I blame thee not! – this heart, I know,
To be long loved was never framed;
For something in its depths doth glow
Too strange, too restless, too untamed.”
From ‘Faded Leaves’:
“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.”
These are goodish, but he definitely seems hampered by the form. It uses him rather than the other way around.
From ‘Dover Beach’:
“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.”
I can now see that this is somewhat of a flawed premise. Obviously not all poetry can be good, even if it’s old. Far more books were written in the nineteenth century than those by Eliot, Austen, Brontës 1-3, and Dickens, yet they don’t survive on in the collective reading consciousness. Why? They were zeitgeisty rather than good. They were copies, not originals. They provided ‘more of the same’ instead of obeying any internal drive. In short, they were what I suspect the crop of things I rate one-star among the publications of recent years will eventually become. (Obviously, my opinion is the one that matters … in my opinion.)
All of which is to say, that Matthew Arnold wrote half a good poem (On Dover Beach) and the rest of his output is forgettable. I glazed over while reading it, and retain only a brief sense that the poems were own-brand copies of the most boring bits of Byron, Pope, and Coleridge.
From ‘Switzerland’:
“I blame thee not! – this heart, I know,
To be long loved was never framed;
For something in its depths doth glow
Too strange, too restless, too untamed.”
From ‘Faded Leaves’:
“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.”
These are goodish, but he definitely seems hampered by the form. It uses him rather than the other way around.
From ‘Dover Beach’:
“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.”
November 5, 2024
Solid selection of the works of a second-line poet but first-rate cultural critic, who was both exemplar and acute analyst of what he conceived as a consciously high Victorian culture of individualistically derived but socially ritualised, non-Catholic Christianity and moralistic idealism, and who was also a self-imagined prophet of a culture that rejected materialism and the strictures of economy in favour of a mythologised, intellectual, Grecian, classicised past, which could be held in opposition to the contemporary, Romanised British, materialistic imperium he loathed.
In these poems, Matthew Arnold seeks to cultivate in verse the cultural norms by which he wished to be measured and to which he urged his society to aspire, and to give an artistic model of the culture about which he wrote in his prose, all within an ambience of cultural ennui and decay, and wistful regret for a lost age of the mind that might never have been.
Arnold's cultural ambition was high, but, as these poems reveal in their overall inability to attain the absolute excellence required to satisfy his calling, was never achievable, even then, in an age of mechanistic and technological progression bereft of lyricism and the leisure required for thought and the memorialising a shared, culturally homogenous, past.
In these poems, Matthew Arnold seeks to cultivate in verse the cultural norms by which he wished to be measured and to which he urged his society to aspire, and to give an artistic model of the culture about which he wrote in his prose, all within an ambience of cultural ennui and decay, and wistful regret for a lost age of the mind that might never have been.
Arnold's cultural ambition was high, but, as these poems reveal in their overall inability to attain the absolute excellence required to satisfy his calling, was never achievable, even then, in an age of mechanistic and technological progression bereft of lyricism and the leisure required for thought and the memorialising a shared, culturally homogenous, past.
August 1, 2022
Favourites: “So some tempestuous morn in early June” from “Thyrsis”; “The Forsaken Merman” (“a ceiling of amber, a pavement of pearl”) and “Dover Beach”. Although I am a Christian, I have always found “Dover Beach” a deeply moving poem. Its main theme is the loss of faith in the nineteenth century, but the last lines are haunting: “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”. It certainly feels like that much of the time....
June 26, 2017
I love Matthew Arnold's critical writing and his essays on translating Homer are among the best I've read on the key needs of translation. But, his poetry isn't my favorite.
Arnold's poem "Sohrab and Rustum" reminds me a bit of a young Byron (e.g. The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair and Lara) and definitely invokes Homer, but Arnold lacks Homer and Byron's finesse and passion. I did like The Strayed Reveller (probably for its Homeric root) and I was taken with "Calais Sands".
Arnold's poem "Sohrab and Rustum" reminds me a bit of a young Byron (e.g. The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair and Lara) and definitely invokes Homer, but Arnold lacks Homer and Byron's finesse and passion. I did like The Strayed Reveller (probably for its Homeric root) and I was taken with "Calais Sands".
June 8, 2012
The author of losing faith. Love him. Make sure to read "Dover Beach."
A few selections:
"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; a longing to inquire into the mystery of this heart which beats so wild, so deep in us--to know whence our lives come and where they go."
Or how about this quote from Arnold's "Culture and Anarchy" (not included) where Arnold scrutinized the tendency to bend all human perceptions to the religious sensitivities:
". . . the tendency in us to . . . sacrifice all other sides of our being to the religious side. This tendency has its cause in the divine beauty and grandeur of religion, and bears affecting testimony to them; but we have seen that it has dangers for us, we have seen that it leads to a narrow and twisted growth of our religious side itself, and to a failure in perfection.
A few selections:
"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; a longing to inquire into the mystery of this heart which beats so wild, so deep in us--to know whence our lives come and where they go."
Or how about this quote from Arnold's "Culture and Anarchy" (not included) where Arnold scrutinized the tendency to bend all human perceptions to the religious sensitivities:
". . . the tendency in us to . . . sacrifice all other sides of our being to the religious side. This tendency has its cause in the divine beauty and grandeur of religion, and bears affecting testimony to them; but we have seen that it has dangers for us, we have seen that it leads to a narrow and twisted growth of our religious side itself, and to a failure in perfection.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews