Elegiac poetry is most congenial to Arnold’s mind; his genius was essentially elegiac. Not only are Arnold’s elegies numerous, but they also constitute his best work in poetry. His elegies are in the line of Gray rather than Milton or Shelley or Tennyson. Even the personal elegies are marked with a note of general grief. “Thyrsis” is an elegy on his friend Clough; “Rugby Chapel” commemorates the death of his father Dr. Arnold, the Headmaster of Rugby’ “A Southern Night” is for his brother; “Westminster Abbey” is written on the death of Dean Stanley and “The Scholar Gipsy” is relating the decay of an age. In his elegies of keen personal sorrow the poet widens his view and treats of human destiny, almost as much as Gray does in his “The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”. In his elegiac poetry we find an intensity of feeling, which elsewhere we seek in vain. In it he gives free rein to his heart, and no longer starves in by a laborious search for premature tranquility or for academic correctness.
Arnold’s melancholy and pessimism spring from many causes, the chief of them being the contemplation of man’s destiny from the hopeless tangle of his own age, and from the course of the life of mortal men on the earth. Disappointment in love, death of friends and relatives, loss of faith in the age and above all the melancholy cast of his mind were further responsible for his pessimistic and melancholy outlook on life. In “Rugby Chapel” we get a peep into the general lot of humanity, which is, in no way, pleasing or heart-soothing rather profoundly melancholic or pessimistic:
“Most men eddy about
Here and there – eat and drink
Are raised aloft, are hurl’d in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving nothing
And then they die – perish.”
[Rugby Chapel: Matthew Arnold]
Arnold in “Dover Beach”, a profoundly melancholy poem, grieves at the decay of religious faith under the irresistible impact of barren materialism. Faith recedes like the waves of the sea –
“But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath.”
[Dover Beach: Matthew Arnold]
The mood of melancholy is quite in harmony with the melancholy sound of the receding waves. The world is full of incertitude, blankness and despair. To the poet, the world is a vale of tears, a place to endure and suffer. His outlook is completely melancholic as he represents the world as dreary as desert; the world
“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 fight
Where ignorant armies clash by night!”
[Dover Beach: Matthew Arnold]
In grief and despair man leads his life, without ever the glow or joy of life, the peace of mind. In “The Scholar Gipsy” the tragedy and pathos of man’s lot in the universe is pathetically related:
“For whom each year we see
Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new
Who hesitate and falter life away
And lose tomorrow the ground won today.”
[The Scholar Gipsy: Matthew Arnold]
The same strain of melancholy runs throughout the poem.
“Thyrsis”, which is Arnold’s only elegy written in the traditional form, is a brief lyric of mourning or utterance of personal bereavement and sorrow at the death of his friend Arthur Hugh Clough. But, it may seem extravagant to rank “Thyrsis” with the four great poems in which English poets have enshrined the memory of departed friends. But, though it is less elaborate and ornate than Milton’s “Lycidas” or Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” and less aflame with fiery scorn than Shelley’s “Adonias”, it is more spontaneous and more tenderly regretful than any of its rivals, and leaves a deeper impression of the personal loss, which the poet has sustained.
If we except the best of his elegiac compositions, none of Arnold’s verse reaches the highest class of poetry. His achievements will not raise him above the rank of minor poets. He is, in fact, a nineteenth-century Gray. He is less remarkable for what he says than for his manner of saying it, and he is never so completely a child of nature as to forget the form in which he clothes his thoughts. Yet in the austere earnestness of his tone and in the breadth of his simple style, he is essentially and imaginative, rather than a fanciful poet. Dissatisfied with the mere adornment of ideas, he calls up images, which more incline to vastness and sublimity than to filigree and definiteness. He esteems the solid worth of a single stone above the number and variety of the sparkling jewels into which in may be cut. He is not rapid, exuberant or profuse, but stately, measured, self-restrained. His aim is unity of impression, sustained power and simplicity of effect.
