Matthew Arnold – Interesting Literature

‘The Forsaken Merman’: A Poem by Matthew Arnold

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 lover.

The Forsaken Merman

Come, dear children, let us away;
Down and away below!
Now my brothers call from the bay,
Now the great winds shoreward blow,
Now the salt tides seaward flow;
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.

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 celebrates the four brief years he had his dog Geist, the dachshund who was his ‘little friend’, by his side.

Geist’s Grave

Four years!—and didst thou stay above
The ground, which hides thee now, but four?
And all that life, and all that love,
Were crowded, Geist! into no more?

Only four years those winning ways,
Which make me for thy presence yearn,
Call’d us to pet thee or to praise,
Dear little friend! at every turn?

That loving heart, that patient soul,
Had they indeed no longer span,
To run their course, and reach their goal,
And read their homily to man?

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. In one of his less famous poems, the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822-88) wondered what it means to grow old.

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 this five-line poem shows, he sometimes had a succinct way with words which many of his wordier contemporaries could never master.

Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say we feel – below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel – there flows
With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.

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 – in this case, by contrasting the thoroughly ‘modern’ Cousin Nancy with the more traditional attitudes of those around her. You can read ‘Cousin Nancy’ here.

‘Cousin Nancy’ describes the young woman of the title. There we come to our first problem. What evidence is there that she is young? Well, she is ‘Miss Nancy Ellicott’, but middle-aged and elderly women can be unmarried, too. Or is it the fact that her aunts are mentioned, thus making her seem younger? Or the fact that she is described doing very active things – striding across the New England hills, riding a horse across the hills, dancing the ‘modern dances’? A combination of these things, it would seem.