An allegory is a work of literature with a hidden meaning beneath the surface of its narrative. On the surface, Arnold's poem is about a merman, a mythical, pagan figure, who marries a human named Margaret. They have children together and live a lovely, seemingly magical life in the caverns by the sea:
Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, Where the winds are all asleep; Where the spent lights quiver and gleam ...
But this life is interrupted when, at Easter, Margaret's human side is
pulled back to the church and Christianity so that she abandons the merman and
his children.
This story is an allegory for what Arnold felt was the coldness and loss
of faith in the Christian church at that time, as its traditional ideas were
being shaken and tested by advances in science. By going to what is three times
called the "little grey" church, Margaret abandons what is vital in life to
pursue a small, worn-out ("grey") faith. Even when her husband comes to her and
pleads with her to come back to her children, who "moan," Margaret stays stuck,
her eyes "seal'd to the holy book."
Margaret symbolizes, or becomes an allegory for, the people who miss life
by sticking with a weak, fading religion with little left to offer. The
children sing of the loss of their mother, calling her "cruel" for abandoning
them.
As he expresses in other poems, Arnold would have liked the Victorian age
to have the robust, communal faith he imagined in the Middle Ages, but he saw
contemporary Christianity as leaving people lonely and cut off from each other,
just as Margaret is cut off from her former life.
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