POETS Day! Arnold on Dover, Hecht on Arnold
Photo by Dover Beach by Chris Whippet, CC BY-SA 2.0
Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Cool is turning into hot, but humidity is still a few weeks away. This is prime seer-sucker time. Parks where ice cream vendors hang out are calling. Edwardian style military bands don’t play in gazebos anymore like they’re supposed to, but cell phones are everywhere and Amnesty International says cobalt used to manufacture yours may have been mined by children, but the chances will drop considerably by 2025 if the Democratic Republic of the Congo keeps their word and ends the practice by 2025. I’m just messing with you. Nobody thinks about that anymore.
Fire up your music app and stream something you’d think Sgt. Pepper’s would play if they weren’t The Beatles. Oompa band stuff. Fly a kite. Get a hotdog and wish you had one of those hats that feel like they’re made out of rice cakes and have a red, white, and blue band; the ones old politicians pretended they always wore.
Howsoever you spend your POETS Day afternoon, take a minute for a little verse. It’s good for you.
***
Matthew Arnold’s father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, stood as headmaster at Rugby School and took it as his mission to “change the face of education ‘all through the Public Schools of England,’” according to the anonymous biographer at poetryfoundation.org. He was a moralist and a strict Christian who was so identified with his school that when Thomas Hughes wrote his classic novel set at Rugby, Tom Brown’s School Days, he didn’t bother to fictionalize the headmaster. The Doctor was an unavoidable presence at the school during his time and as much a part of the institution as the Old Quad Buildings. That means that in Hughes’s telling, it was Matthew Arnold’s father who expelled the bully Harry Paget Flashman, OBE, Victoria’s Cross, Knight Commander of Bath, Knight Commander Indian Empire, Congressional Medal of Honor (USA), Southern Cross of Honor (Confederate States of America), etc.
Dr. Arnold’s reputation is set. He was, or fit well into the role of, an archetype; the strict scholarly Christian reformer doing his upright duty to fashion more upright duty doers. Matthew Arnold’s literary personage stands in contrast to his father’s upright example. And then it doesn’t. And then it does again.
Here’s another bit from poetryfoundation.org, this time an edited quotation of Arnold’s (referring to Matthew rather than Thomas from here on) lifelong friend Arthur Hugh Clough’s observation:
“Matt is full of Parisianism; Theatre in general and Rachel in special: he enters the room with a chanson of Beranger’s on his lips… his hair is guiltless of English scissors: he breakfasts at 12… and in the week… he has been to Chapel once.”
Like his father, Arnold made a career in education. He was a teacher, eventually elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford. In that role he was a reformer in at least one respect, though of a liberal bent, becoming the first of the school’s Professors of Poetry to lecture in English rather than Latin. He would go on join Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools, a position that sent him from town to town, school to school. The biographer Stefan Collini writes,
“…that he, among the first generation of the railway age, traveled across more of England than any man of letters had ever done. Although his duties were later confined to a smaller area, Arnold knew the society of provincial England better than most of the metropolitan authors and politicians of the day.”
His contemporaries thought he could be “frivolous” according to Wikipedia. There are different voices employed by Arnold for different tasks. That uncredited Poetry Foundation employee, again, writes “of his prose as urbane, didactic and often satirically witty in its self-imposed task” after “of his poetry as gnomic or thought-laden, or as melancholy or elegiac.”
It may be that his travels gave him a sense of who reads his prose and who reads his poetry. His criticism, for which he is most highly regarded, is, as mentioned, didactic. Even from a podium a teacher is trying to connect and reveal. In his poetry, Arnold can come across as a serious person who only talks about serious things to serious people. This isn’t a sin, but it risks stuffiness. I think of an otherwise go-lucky Arnold sifting subjects into categories, deeming which he should be witty about and which require his solemn poet hat.
Considered among the most important critics of his age, his poetic reputation suffers from emphasis on the “did not medal” part of the phrase “did not medal in the Olympics.” He’s mentioned with Tennyson, Browning, and Rossetti, which is extraordinary praise, but in that company he pales. Harold Bloom took a break from gushing over Wallace Stevens to write “his worth may not merit the reputation it has continued to hold in the twentieth century… at his best, a very good but highly derivative poet.”
“Dover Beach” is among his most famous poems and like his body of work as a whole, is good enough to attract critics pointing out problems. Collini calls it the “first major ‘free-verse’ poem in the language.” It’s “melancholy” and “elegiac.” Christianity is fading from Europe and Arnold sees disasters on the horizon. Arnold held views that are unclear to me. He seems to say that the Christianity is based in part on a myth, but those mythical aspects are of importance to a truer whole. That’s a horrid approximation and I won’t go farther in conveying because I’ve read glancingly of the matter and his body of work is vast. I mention it because it’s a difference from his father’s beliefs but held with similar zeal. He’s like him. He’s not. What’s important is that he felt that Christianity was vital to the culture. His parsing of dogma doesn’t matter to the poem or our understanding of it.
The poem is set in Dover, which should surprise no one given the title. That’s where Arnold honeymooned in 1851, but it’s believed portions were written around 1849. That the poem was written in stages would help explain a noted fault. “The sea is calm tonight,” begins the first stanza. The second concerns the Aegean Sea. The third starts “The Sea of Faith.” The fourth stanza, the resolution, has no reference to the sea at all. There’s a disconnect.
The concluding lines,
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
refer to Thucydides The Peloponnesian War, Book 7, Section 44, describing a night battle between the forces of Athens and Syracuse. From Thomas Hobbes’s 1629 translation, one certainly known to Arnold:
“And here the Athenians were mightily in disorder and perplexed, so that it hath been hard to be informed of any side in what manner each thing passed. For if in the day time, when things are better seen, yet they that are present cannot tell how all things go, save only what every man with much ado seeth near unto himself, how then in a battle by night (the only one that happened between great armies in all this war) can a man know anything for certain?”
Later in the section:
“For after the Athenians once turned their backs, all before them was in confusion; and it was hard to distinguish of anything for the noise.”
In the first stanza, Arnold writes,
… on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
That’s it for light. After that we get,
Listen! You hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back and fling,
More on that line later, but after the above there is “cadence” and “eternal note.” We’re told what Sophocles heard, what is in that sound and then a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” Only noise. There is definitely the disconnect, but he follows the sensory direction of Thucydides’s battle. I’m not as bothered as much as others.
It’s beautiful language. Melancholy. Very melancholy. But beautiful.
Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.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.
Returning to the ninth line, the one that begins “Listen!”: This is the first line in which we are told that this isn’t a soliloquy. He’s speaking to someone. In the beginning of the fourth stanza, we find out that there is someone with him. “Ah, love.” Before that it could have been a “Dear Reader” address.
Anthony Hecht was a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. He was part of the 97th Infantry Division, the force that liberated the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp, and served as translator for prisoners who spoke French and German. David Mason notes in The Wall Street Journal (“The Life and Work of a Poet’s Poet, 11/4-5/2023) “Like Richard Wilbur, to whom he is often compared, Hecht was profoundly changed by his Army service in World War II.”
He could be melancholy, but he could also be hilarious, and he didn’t save his wit exclusively for prose. I think the following is one of the funniest poetic responses I’ve come across. He reads “Ah love,” and says “Wow, Matt. You really know how to show a girl a good time.”
Have a great weekend.
The Dover Bitch
A Criticism of Life: for Andrew Wanning
Anthony Hecht (1923-2004)So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, ‘Try to be true to me,
And I’ll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.’
Well now, I knew this girl. It’s true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And the she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you musn’t judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She’s really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it’s a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come,
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d’Amour.
