Matthew Arnold (1822-88) was a fine Victorian poet and critic who also wrote the classic poem ‘Dover Beach’. ‘The Forsaken Merman’ is a less famous poem than that, but it’s an interesting narrative poem about – you guessed it – a merman (or ‘male mermaid’) who is forsaken by his […]
Tag: Matthew Arnold
A Short Analysis of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Geist’s Grave’
And as well as penning ‘Thyrsis’, his celebrated elegy for the death of his old friend Arthur Hugh Clough, and ‘Dover Beach’, his lament for Victorian faith, the poet and educator Matthew Arnold (1822-88) also wrote elegies for his pet dog Geist and his canary Matthias. In ‘Geist’s Grave’, Arnold […]
A Short Analysis of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Growing Old’
On Arnold’s little-known meditation on growing older ‘Growing old’s like being increasingly penalised for a crime you haven’t committed.’ So said the great novelist Anthony Powell, summing up the sense of injustice that accompanies the onset of old age. There’s even a word for a fear of growing old: gerascophobia. […]
A Short Analysis of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Below the surface-stream’
A reading of a little-known miniature poem ‘Below the surface-stream, shallow and light’: so begins a little gem of a poem which features in the complete poems of Victorian poet Matthew Arnold (1822-88). Arnold famously gave up poetry because he felt he had largely failed in his vocation, but as […]
A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Cousin Nancy’
A reading of a short Eliot poem by Dr Oliver Tearle ‘Cousin Nancy’ appeared in T. S. Eliot’s first volume of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917. It is one of a series of poems included in the volume which satirise and analyse the stuffiness of New England society […]