SOURCE: “Love Poetry: Sincerity and Subversive Voices,” in Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language, University Press of Virginia, 1988, pp. 163-203.

[In the following essay, Riede discusses Arnold's love poetry and his frustration with the inadequacy of human speech.]

The conventions and consolatory purposes of elegy put enormous pressure on poetic language to say the utmost that can be said about life, death, and the hereafter. Indeed, elegy tempts the poet to say more than can be justly said, excuses the flattering fictions and the consoling lie. Similarly, love poetry involves sets of conventions that may tempt the poet to excess, to flattery, seductive deception of the beloved, and even self-deception. The love poem is, in one tradition, a tissue of transparent fictions, specious logic, and false spirituality designed seriously to woo or playfully to seduce—the beloved is a divinity, love is eternal, union is paradise. An important convention of love poetry, of course, is that both author and reader recognize and accept the hyperboles as pleasant fictions, exercises in troping on the simple idea of being in love. But the hyperbolic descriptions of love can be taken seriously as an attempt to express insatiable desire and aspiration, especially when no higher ideal than human love is to be found. Consequently, for many nineteenth-century writers, love comes to replace religious faith as the primary source of value and meaning in life. Agnostic poets eager to find and utter the largest possible truths about human life wrote a good deal of love poetry in the nineteenth century, attempting to use the old conventions with a new earnestness and sincerity, attempting in love poetry even more than in the elegy to utter absolute truth, to communicate genuinely in language. Without a divine word to order the phenomenal world and give its expression meaning, Byron, Shelley, and Keats among the romantics, and Swinburne, Rossetti, and Arnold among the Victorians persistently attempted to look within, to read the language of the heart. Shelley, in the brief essay “On Love,” described love in part as a desire that one's language be precisely understood, that one be able to escape isolation in the self by perfect communion with another human being.

Other Victorian poets were more obviously love poets than Arnold was, but for none was it so absolutely clear that love presented the ultimate challenge to sincere self-expression. “The Buried Life” is from beginning to end concerned with whether “even lovers” can “reveal / To one another what indeed they feel” (ll. 14-15), and the poems of the “Switzerland” series examine the possibilities of escaping isolation within the self through passionate love. But over and over again the poems arrive at the conclusion that even love cannot enable the speaker to say what he means, to find an effective—let alone a magical or definitive—language. As E. D. H. Johnson said, Arnold's love poetry makes clear “that in the modern world there no longer exists any channel for communication between one individual and another on the level of the deeper sensibilities. The impossibility of true love is thus emblematic of a general breakdown in human intercourse.”¹ With the notable exception of “Dover Beach,” Arnold's best love poems are preoccupied with the failure of language to express honest feelings, to utter the most important truths of human relationships. But even beyond the thematic expression of the difficulty, the poems necessarily enact the failure of language that they only partially understand and describe—not because Arnold planned it that way, but because he was right in his sense of the incapacity of language, and especially of highly conventional poetic language, to express unmediated truth. That is, the poems cannot simply speak “from the heart”—to achieve any meaning or significance at all, they must refer to the whole Western discourse about love, must accept, reject, qualify, or in any case respond to prior utterances about love and the language of love. The poems are particularly interesting as studies in intertextuality because they so clearly seek to transcend discourse while engaging in it, a feat as impossible as picking oneself up by the seat of the trousers. Because they are, as poems, deliberately placed within a tradition of obviously artificial conventions, they of course make the effort to speak “naturally” all the more clearly futile. For this reason T. S. Eliot said that the proper language of love is prose, not the public and artificial language of poetry²—but of course Eliot was further than Arnold from the romantic notion that poetry is the natural language of the passions. Yet to be natural, poetic language must avoid its unavoidable conventionality. Robert Browning, faced with this difficulty, adopted the unusual idea that if the artist is to speak sincerely to his love, he must do so in a language of which he has not mastered the conventions:

          no artist lives and loves, that longs not
Once and only once, and for one only,
(Ah, the prize!) to find his love a language
Fit and fair and simple and sufficient—
Using nature that’s an art to others,
Not, this one time, art that’s turned his nature.

(“One Word More,” ll. 59-64)

But a language that is “sufficient” (Arnold would have preferred “adequate”) is not to be had—there are simply no words (or signs of any other kind) to denote the fine shades of individual feeling. And a language that is “simple” cannot be had, since to be comprehensible at all language must take its place in the increasingly complex discourse of a chaotic civilization. The poems of the “Switzerland” series, “The Buried Life,” and “Dover Beach” are all relatively short lyrics, and evidently less ambitious than Empedocles on Etna, or Sohrab and Rustum, or Merope, but they represent in its clearest and most urgent form Arnold's longing to find an authentic and authoritative language, and they demonstrate emphatically the impossibility of doing so.

“SWITZERLAND”

Over the past quarter-century it has become critical standard practice to lament the inordinate amount of biographical criticism of Arnold's two series of love lyrics and to wish the poems could be treated as works of art. Critics complain that, for our understanding of the poems, it does not matter whether the “Marguerite” of the “Switzerland” poems was a real woman, let alone who she was, and that it similarly does not matter whether the five poems of “Faded Leaves” describe a crisis in Arnold's courtship of Frances Lucy Wightman. Perhaps now that the biographical events behind the poems have been somewhat sorted out in Park Honan's masterful biography, critics will no longer feel the need to scrutinize “Switzerland” for clues to Arnold's life.³ Yet it is important to note that it does very much matter to our understanding of the poems whether Arnold was writing autobiography or was generating a fictive construct out of whole cloth. If we assume, as William Buckler does, that each poem is to be read on New Critical grounds, divorced from biographical considerations, we are likely to argue—as Buckler does—that the “Switzerland” series is a monodrama analogous to Tennyson's Maud and that “Arnold places at the center of this drama a hero so fallible that he brings to his lyrics the exacerbated stresses suggestive of a species of madness.”⁴ The interest of the poems in such a case, and Buckler draws this out very well, is in the controlled dramatization and analysis of certain morbid states of mind, and in the skill with which Arnold manipulates the ironic distance between author and speaker. It is assumed that the poet controls his language absolutely. But if the poems are at all self-analytical, as the biographical evidence strongly suggests, Arnold and his speaker are less easily disentangled, ironic distances diminish, and the gap between what is said and what the poet feels is a function of the “sad incompetence of human speech” not of controlled authorial detachment. The argument is not whether Arnold was a great poet who knew what he was doing or a poor one who could not handle his materials but whether the poems transcend the romantic ideology they dramatize or enact the entrapment within that ideology of a major poet. Reading the lyrics from a New Critical perspective that would have been alien to Arnold makes him seem a more “modern” poet but obscures our sense of the controlling personal, historical, and ideological pressures that frame and control his discourse. And among these was the belief, fostered by Wordsworth in particular and romanticism in general, that the poet should speak sincerely and from his own experience. Arnold shifted his ground on this point, but in 1848, not long before writing the “Switzerland” poems, he was praising Goethe (and, to a lesser extent, Wordsworth) for “his thorough sincerity—writing about nothing that he had not experienced.”⁵ The poems are best understood not as autonomous artifacts dislocated in time but as manifestations of how a particular mind at a particular historical time and place could enter the vast and complex Western discourse about love.

Nevertheless, Buckler is undoubtedly right to the extent that whatever autobiographical materials the poems may discuss, the finished “Switzerland” series is indisputably a work of art in which speaker and author cannot be simply identified. Transforming personal experience into art necessarily involves a certain aesthetic distance precisely because the personal and idiosyncratic must be rendered conventional in order to be understood. But it is important to realize that this need to conventionalize and so to falsify personal experience is not just a speaker's problem but Arnold's. Still, the poems do take their place within a well-established literary tradition of attempting to analyze and understand fundamental human problems through a series of love lyrics. In a general sense the tradition can be traced to the lyric sequences of the Italian stilnovisti or the sonnet sequences of the English Renaissance, though G. Robert Stange finds more immediate precedents in Wordsworth's “Lucy poems” and the German Liedercyklus.⁶ As Stange and others have argued, Arnold's careful arrangement and rearrangement of the sequence make it clear that he was attempting to fuse them into an aesthetically satisfying whole, and not just to pour out his soul in heartfelt utterance, and this is yet more evidence that the speaker is not simply Arnold, but at most a tidied up, orderly, more conventionalized Arnold.⁷ Still, there is no doubt that though the speaker is not precisely Arnold, his problems are profoundly Arnoldian, and chief among his problems is the impossibility of direct communication through efficient speech, the impossibility, in a sense, of Arnold's presenting himself as unequivocal, unadulterated, unmistakable Arnold.

Among the most fundamental Arnoldian difficulties, as we have repeatedly seen, is the ever-frustrated need to find an authoritative voice, a voice that can utter truth. Perhaps more conspicuously than anywhere else in Arnold's poetry, the feebleness and inadequacy of human speech is illustrated in the “Switzerland” series by the sudden intrusions of an infallible utterance from on high. In “Meeting,” for example, the speaker begins the poem, and the series, with calm self-assurance:

Again I see my bliss at hand,
The town, the lake are here;
My Marguerite smiles upon the strand,
Unaltered with the year.
I know that graceful figure fair,
That cheek of languid hue;
I know that soft, enkerchiefed hair,
And those sweet eyes of blue.

The tranquil tone is achieved partly by the very first word, “Again,” which suggests the comfortable continuation of a smooth, continuous discourse (even without knowing what was before, the reader accepts as a poetic convention that there is a “before”) and by the direct appeals to experience, “I see,” and to certainty, “I know … I know.” But as soon as contemplation gives way to action, a more authoritative voice breaks in to destroy the confidence of the earlier one:

Again I spring to make my choice;
Again in tones of ire
I hear a God's tremendous voice:
“Be counselled, and retire.”

(ll. 9-12)

Here as elsewhere in Arnold's poetry the voice of God rings hollow. It is not even really the voice of God but of a vague, unspecified divinity, “a God,” and however “tremendous,” it is utterly unconvincing except as a projection of the speaker's own latent reservations. Simply by representing an unconvincing voice of God the poem suggests that there is no genuine, authoritative voice but only the wish for one. Yet even this specious authority is enough to collapse the calm of the previous lines, and looking back at them we see how vulnerable they are. The appeal to experience, “I see,” is unfounded—he sees Marguerite, but perhaps is indulging in an unfounded assumption when he translates this into the language of love: “I see my bliss.” Bliss, to make the obvious point, cannot be seen. Further, the possessive, even proprietary “My Marguerite” and the implication that she is “unaltered” in affections as well as in appearance make unsupported claims about the relationship, and even the repetition of “I know … I know” turns out to assert no more than superficial recognition. Not surprisingly, the poem that began with the calm of simple indicative sentences ends with an open question to mysterious powers and an exclamatory plea for peace:

Ye guiding Powers who join and part,
What would ye have with me?
Ah, warn some more ambitious heart,
And let the peaceful be!

(ll. 13-16)

The poem, understood most simply, is about a sense of foreboding that erupts into a too complacent anticipation of bliss, but it is also the enactment of the eruption of one inadequate form of discourse into another to generate, in the final stanza, a rhetoric of nervous uncertainty.

It is too simple, however, to say that the mysterious “God” and the “guiding Powers” are simply metaphoric projections of the speaker's forebodings. In “Human Life,” which was never a part of the “Switzerland” series but was written at about the same time and involved similar concerns, the “guiding Powers” reappear as “some unknown Powers” (l. 26) that guide us, even against our will, to some predetermined end. These “Powers” do not simply “warn,” but rule, and they deny us

The joys which were not for our use designed;
The friends to whom we had no natural right,
The homes that were not destined to be ours.

(ll. 28-30)

In the “Switzerland” poems, as is anticipated in “Meeting,” the “Powers” will eventually deny the speaker his beloved. In “To Marguerite—Continued” the “Powers” appear once again as “a God,” not to warn, but to decree:

Who ordered, that their longing's fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled?
Who renders vain their deep desire?—
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.

(ll. 19-24)

The authoritative presence of the God provides a concise explanation of human misery, but within the emotional context of the poems it even more clearly provides an excuse for the speaker's failure in love. Since all is destined and decreed, the individual is not responsible for his actions. If the love affair with Marguerite went wrong, it was not the speaker's fault—it just was not meant to be. The God is presented as an absolutely authoritative voice, but this voice emerges from the thoroughly questionable source of the speaker's psychological need for justification. Ultimately this God cannot be taken seriously as more than the wish for certainty, the wish for absolute dictates to explain and justify human behavior. Once again he is only “a God,” asking to be understood as definitive but remaining vague and unconvincing. The more authoritative the discourse attempts to become, the more hollow it in fact becomes. The introduction of a mysterious God as an explanation of human suffering becomes a cheap and easy evasion—not transcendence—of the difficulties and uncertainties of unauthorized human discourse.

The evasions are, to be sure, the speaker's, and the speaker is not simply Arnold, so it would be wrong to conclude that Arnold in fact believed in “a God” as more than a metaphoric simplification of all the unknown, indescribable forces that obstruct human happiness. Nevertheless, the simplification is itself an evasion that enables Arnold as well as the speaker to make pithy, resonant, seemingly authoritative statements about the human condition. Yet this evasion is essential to the inner dramatic tension of both “Meeting” and “To Marguerite—Continued.” The generation of transcendental terms from a cry of desire indicates the hollowness of those terms as the poems enact the development and dependence on essentially empty words. Also, the sheer desperation to find a definitive form of utterance demonstrates the perceived inadequacy of ordinary, referential speech. In “Meeting” the seemingly authoritative transcendental speech forced a reassessment of the seemingly empirical discourse that preceded it. In “To Marguerite—Continued” the “God” confirms rather than contradicts the preceding ideas about the inevitability of human isolation, but even so the evident need to introduce a new, supposedly more authoritative, mode of discourse implies that the preceding mode had been perceived as insufficiently authoritative. In both cases the juxtaposition of human utterance with purportedly divine truth results in a tension that calls into question the adequacy of both modes of speech.

The “divine” confirmation of human utterance at the end of “To Marguerite—Continued” is all the more remarkable since the poem begins—as the title implies—as a continuation and confirmation of a still earlier discourse. It begins, in fact, with an emphatic “Yes!” presumably in response to the preceding poem, “Isolation. To Marguerite.”⁸ The need for such doubly emphatic confirmation of the initial poem would seem to suggest a lack of confidence in it as an authoritative statement. As in the opening stanzas of “Meeting,” the discourse in “Isolation” is apparently based on empirical evidence, though in this case the poem analyzes experience more fully. The first two stanzas establish the “lesson” of the poem, and explain how it was learned:

We were apart; yet, day by day,
I bade my heart more constant be.
I bade it keep the world away,
And grow a home for only thee;
Nor feared but thy love likewise grew,
Like mine, each day, more tried, more true.
The fault was grave! I might have known,
What far too soon, alas! I learned—
The heart can bind itself alone,
And faith may oft be unreturned.
Self-swayed our feelings ebb and swell—
Thou lov'st no more;—Farewell! Farewell!

The diction and syntax are simple, straightforward, declarative. The speaker had been able to communicate with his own heart (“I bade my heart … I bade it …”) but not with that of his beloved. He had presumptuously assumed a union of hearts, a sympathetic and corresponding constancy, but he has learned from experience that love is not always reciprocated, that love does not necessarily enable one to escape isolation in the self by communion with the beloved. The movement, from innocence to experience, naiveté to disillusionment, implies that the lesson learned and the discourse engaged in are based empirically. Cultural illusions about two hearts beating as one are jettisoned in the face of contradictory personal experience. But of course the empirical evidence is woefully insufficient, since the evident fact that the speaker's love is unreciprocated can hardly prove that love is never reciprocated, and the overblown romantic posturings that follow demonstrate that the speaker has not been chastened by experience, but seduced by another set of conventional cultural assumptions. Like Byron or Obermann, he bids a dramatic “Farewell!” to the world of deceived mortals and bids his “lonely heart” (l. 13) retreat: “Back to thy solitude again” (l. 18). Literary and cultural imitation, not unmediated experience of life, now informs the poem's language, and leads it even to what Buckler has called the “superbly literary moment” when the speaker compares himself to the mythically personified moon: “Back! with the conscious thrill of shame / Which Luna felt” (ll. 19-20) when she longingly gazed on Endymion.⁹ The language of the poem, at first so simple, becomes increasingly inflated as the speaker justifies and magnifies his cosmic sorrow. The mythic interlude, rather like the eruption of a divine voice in other poems, indexes the speaker's dissatisfaction with a language based merely on experience, but it is almost irrelevant to his real situation. In the first place, Luna is described as moving toward love, not away from it, and in the second place, as the speaker soon recognizes, she can hardly be used as an analogy to his experience because she has never experienced human love. With this realization the speaker moves once more, with greater urgency, back to the empirical basis of his discourse:

Yet she, chaste queen, had never proved
How vain a thing is mortal love,
Wandering in Heaven, far removed,
But thou [his heart] hast long had place to prove
This truth—to prove, and make thine own:
“Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.”

(ll. 25-30)

The desire for proof is of course characteristic of Arnold's poetry, and here it is interestingly based on experiential evidence—but also on the ambiguity of the word prove. In the first line “proved” means “experienced” but in the next two uses “prove” equivocally means both “try” and “definitively confirm.” The experiential evidence remains extremely limited, but the verbal quibble leads to an authoritatively stated, dogmatic maxim about human isolation. Empirical language has not described the way things are in life but has become enmeshed in ideological and cultural assumptions and in vacillating, uncertain meanings of words. Consequently, the seemingly definitive maxim does not hold up even for the duration of the poem but is immediately qualified: “Or, if not quite alone” (l. 31), he will have the company of nature and of those “happier men” who

                                                                      at least,
Have dreamed two human hearts might
blend
In one, and were through faith released
From isolation without end
Prolonged; nor knew, although not less
Alone than thou, their loneliness.

(ll. 37-42)

The ending does not reverse the empirically grounded observation that all men are alone, but severely qualifies it. Even the speaker may have the “love, if love, of happier men” (l. 36), and others at least seem to escape their isolation. The speaker's assertion that they are lonely but do not know it seems almost absurd since one can hardly be said to be lonely but not feel lonely. The dream is dismissed as an illusion, but the illusion is most people's reality. And of course, the speaker's “reality,” as we have seen, is at least as culturally determined as the “dream” of “happier men.” Buckler is convinced that Arnold is manipulating a self-deluded speaker throughout this poem, and to an extent that is undoubtedly true, but the uncertainties about what is empirically verifiable and what is not are characteristically Arnoldian, and the fruitless attempt to achieve a clear, authoritative statement epitomizes Arnold's continual struggle for a univocal utterance.

The problem is even more obvious in another “Switzerland” poem, “Parting,” in which two different lyric forms and voices confront each other and eventually issue in yet a third. The poem is not exactly a dialogue of Arnold's mind with itself—it cannot be, because he is unable simply to express his mind. Rather it is a dialogue of different culturally determined voices. One is the voice of Sturm und Drang romanticism, as Byronism at its stormiest impels the speaker to seek the mountain solitudes:

There the torrents drive upward
Their rock-strangled hum;
There the avalanche thunders
The hoarse torrent dumb.
—I come, O ye mountains!
Ye torrents, I come!

(ll. 29-34)

The next presents an ideal of gentle romance, the sweetly domestic charms of the angel in the house:

But who is this, by the half-opened door,
Whose figure casts a shadow on the floor?
The sweet blue eyes—the soft ash-coloured hair—
The cheeks that still their gentle paleness wear—
The lovely lips, with their arch smile that tells
The unconquered joy in which her spirit dwells—
                    Ah! they bend nearer—
                    Sweet lips, this way!

(ll. 35-42)

And the final voice ultimately opts for the solitude of a Byron or Obermann, not by resolving the conflict between the prior perspectives, but by introducing the stern patriarchal tones of a puritanically repressive ideology:

To the lips, ah! of others
                    Those lips have been pressed,
And others, ere I was,
                    Were strained to that breast.

(ll. 67-70)

It is this fastidious sentiment that leads to the poem's sententious moral:

Far, far from each other
                    Our spirits have grown;
And what heart knows another?
                    Ah! who knows his own?

(ll. 71-74)

The rhetorical questions suggest the idea of isolation, estrangement from others and even from oneself, that dominates the “Switzerland” poems, but it has been unearned. More clearly than in “Isolation. To Marguerite” the lesson supposedly learned from experience in love is actually based on juxtaposed and unreconciled literary representations of stock romantic and Victorian attitudes. Yet the poem does demonstrate formally that the speaker does not know his own heart—it is self-ignorance that leads him into the various inadequate poses and patterns of speech. The disjunctive discourse can hardly be said to prove that true knowledge of ourselves or of others is impossible, but it dramatically enacts the plight of a mind divided against itself and unable even to differentiate between superficial, imitative posing and a “true” self. In strictly literary terms, the poem illustrates its entrapment within the inherited codes and conventions of poetic discourse—it can bounce among various forms of conventional discourse but cannot escape or transcend them. Of course the speaker is never simply Arnold, if only because the poet can never be simply himself. The failure of the poems to find a unified, coherent discourse is, in a sense, a measure of the poet's, or speaker's, creditable recognition that the “true” self, like the “best self” of Arnold's prose, is a merely hypothetical construct representative of the desire for an impossible wholeness. The incoherence of these love poems is movingly analogous to Arnold's recognition that consciousness itself is inevitably fragmented, that the various components of the self can never be fully grasped. Indeed, neither Arnold nor anyone else could ever succeed in accurately representing himself if only because, as Jacques Lacan argues, the attempt to construct the self verbally is paradoxically self-alienating: in the labor that one “undertakes to reconstruct for another, he rediscovers the fundamental alienation that made him construct it like another, and which has always destined it to be taken from him by another.” The danger of attempting to construct the self in language is that all that can be caught of the shifting complexities of consciousness would be an imaginary “objectification … of his static state or of his ‘statue,’ in a renewed status of his alienation.”¹⁰ Ironically, it is Arnold's failure to present such a neatly packaged self that saves the Switzerland poems—and “The Buried Life”—from suffering the fate of his inert attempts in classical form.

“Parting” and “Isolation. To Marguerite” both demonstrate the extreme difficulty of speaking of personal experience rather than writing variations on literary themes. “To Marguerite—Continued” is evidently intended to be read as a confirmation of the preceding poem's dictum that individuals are hopelessly alone, estranged from their fellows, but in demonstrating a need to bolster the argument it also demonstrates the perceived weakness of the empirical argument. Interestingly, “To Marguerite—Continued” completely abandons the appeal to personal experience and evolves a stronger, more resonant voice than the individual can muster by bolstering itself with countless echoes from the literary tradition. Kathleen Tillotson, who finds echoes of Horace, Lucretius, Donne, Coleridge, Thackeray, Keble, Carlyle, Browning, Collins, and Foscolo in the poem, has argued that the opening “Yes!” is not a reaffirmation of reality felt along the pulses but is, “finally, something like ‘I know now the truth of what so many have written,’” and she argues that “some part of the poem's power consists in its waking of echoes from our reading, and that these also lay within Arnold's reading.”¹¹ Similarly, Roper declares that the poem is characterized by an “imprecise allusiveness” so that “while no one gloss is especially pertinent, the whole complex of glosses—analogues, sources, allusions, reminiscences—greatly contributes to the almost majestic inevitability” of the work.¹² In some sense “imprecise allusiveness” is characteristic of every poem, since literature inevitably gains its significance by generalized intertextualized reference to the codes and conventions established in the entire body of literary work and, indeed, of language generally, but such poems as “To Marguerite—Continued” draw deliberate attention to the tradition by an ostentatiously literary allusiveness, by echoing literary images so familiar as to have almost become clichés.¹³ In “Isolation” the most obviously “literary” exclamations, the Byronic posturings, tended accidentally to displace the speaker's direct experience, but in the opening of “To Marguerite—Continued” the speaker does not even try to describe individualized experience but fuses complex echoes of traditional voices to generalize about human experience:

Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.

Pointing out specific possible allusions would be redundant after Tillotson's essay, and would be almost beside the point, since the passage is characterized by “imprecise allusiveness” and no one citation can serve as a gloss or even a source—Arnold may or may not have had any of the possible sources in mind when he exploited the general tradition. But it is important to note, as Tillotson has, that Arnold's resonant statement is achieved by implicit refutation of some possible predecessors (Donne's “No man is an Iland,” for example), confirmation of others (most clearly Thackeray's “How lonely we are in the world! … you and I are but a pair of infinite isolations, with some fellow-islands a little more or less near to us”),¹⁴ and qualification and variation of yet others. The contentious voices of his predecessors are subdued to Arnold's purposes and seem to speak univocally with the ponderous weight of the whole literary tradition. The passage epitomizes what Arnold later called the “grand style severe,” which “comes from saying a thing with a kind of intense compression, or in an allusive, brief, almost haughty way, as if the poet's mind were charged with so many and such grave matters, that he would not deign to treat any one of them explicitly” (1:189).

Yet this near perfect blending of multitudinous voices seems somewhat to counter the stanza's premise—such grand concord contrasts with, or at least greatly qualifies, the prevailing idea that “We mortal millions live alone,” in total isolation. The description of “echoing straits between us thrown” reinforces the sense that the islands are not wholly desolate—like Prospero's, these islands are “full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.” The second stanza confirms the idea that human isolation is eased by communication in song, for on each island

The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour.

(ll. 10-12)

The nightingale is among the most traditional of images for the solitary, grieving singer, but it is a symbol of the transmutation of pain to beauty, not of barren isolation. Arnold's own later “Philomela,” of course, makes use of the traditional and mythic symbol in this sense, and in “To Marguerite” the song is evidently itself a “balm,” even a “divine” alleviation of mortal pain, and a form of communication among the scattered isles of human misery. The song of the nightingale, like the perfectly blended voices of the cultural inheritance, suggests that human beings must have some deep primal connection to one another, that once we were “Parts of a single continent!” (l. 16). In short, both the comprehensive allusiveness of Arnold's “grand style” and the symbolic implications of the traditional images imply that the lost human solidarity is recoverable.

The discourse that makes use of the tradition to find a language of plenitude tends toward the contradiction and refutation of the lone individual voice of “Isolation” as “To Marguerite—Continued” develops, but the blending of disparate voices into a univocal utterance may be perceived in a less reassuring way. One may, after all, perceive the hubbub and Babel of countless suppressed, misinterpreted, disagreeing individual utterances beneath the apparent serenity of the poem's unruffled surface—taking only the voices that make themselves most insistently heard, one can argue that Donne, Keble, Horace, Thackeray, and Carlyle can hardly be brought into agreement. The univocity of the grand style is, in this sense, an illusion brought about by ignoring, not reconciling, the vast and perhaps unbreachable differences among isolated individuals. The serenity disguises but does not wholly conceal the tensions brought about by conflating different ideologies, tensions that are most obviously and nakedly present in “Isolation” when the ideal of Byronic solitude is pitted against the ideal of blended human hearts. Further, the manifest reliance on intertextual echoes for resonance and a full range of implication may be seen as evidence that the poem can be no more than “conventional,” and so cannot express the fully personal feelings of the speaker, who therefore is indeed isolated. The allusive method is strangely double-edged—it seems to break down the barriers between individuals, to draw all humanity together in a common voice and sentiment, but at the same time it seems to deny the possibility of simple self-expression. The pessimistic outlook is dominant in the poem, of course, since the evident loss of human solidarity results not in hope for reunion but only in a “longing like despair” (l. 13), an unsatisfiable desire to escape the confines of the self, to communicate with another human being.

The failure, ultimately, of the allusive style to provide a satisfying and definitive form of expression accounts for the sudden eruption of a God's voice into the poem. The ambiguity and ambivalence of merely mortal language is swept aside and replaced by divine fiat: “A God, a God their severance ruled!” But the God is an empty signifier, and his decrees are hollow, so his insertion at this point is only an index of the poet's “longing like despair” for a language that expresses truth. Taken together, the “Switzerland” poems epitomize Arnold's various efforts to find an authoritative voice. The personal voice of “Parting” and “Isolation,” speaking from the heart of anguished experience, can never be genuinely personal, and gives way to the fuller, more freely literary speech of “To Marguerite—Continued.” Liberally drawing on traditional symbols and echoing past voices enabled Arnold to produce one of his greatest, weightiest, most apparently authoritative poems. But this lyrical grand style gives way, as the personal style of “Meeting” did, to an attempt at a still more authoritative speech when a divine decree, a voice of God, is introduced. The effect of bringing in what can only be an empty signifier for the agnostic is jarring not only because it is abrupt and unwarranted but because it shows a lack of confidence in the humanistic mode that would draw strength from the tradition. The various modes of discourse, then, do not reinforce one another, as would seem to be the design, but deconstruct one another, leaving Arnold without an effective language.

The highly allusive condensed style of “To Marguerite—Continued” would certainly seem to be Arnold's strongest and the best suited to his later ideas about the soothing and saving powers of the literary tradition. But one further example, from a mediocre poem, will reveal some of the dangers involved in awaking echoes of dead poets. In Arnold's first arrangement of “Marguerite” poems into a series for “Switzerland” (1853), the opening poem was “To My Friends,” which was later dropped from the series and retitled “A Memory Picture.” The original title of the poem when it was first published in 1849, however, was “To my Friends, who ridiculed a tender Leave-taking.” The original title suggests a specific biographical origin, and Honan's reconstruction indicates that the source of the poem was Arnold's romantic disappointment with Mary Claude (“Marguerite”), and his friends' mockery upon seeing the usually serene and supercilious dandy put down.¹⁵ The epistolary title, moreover, suggests that the poem is a justification or a self-defense, that at least in a general way the poet is portraying himself in the speaker. The theme reinforces Arnold's projected image of a sophisticated young man, able to rise above even heartbreak—he has been wounded in love but wisely realizes that time erases all wounds and obliterates even the occasion of them, and so he attempts to sketch his beloved in verse in order to avoid forgetting her entirely. The cultured, poised stance is communicated by the poem's most notable feature, an allusive refrain that concludes all but one of the eight stanzas: “Ere the parting hour go by, / Quick, thy tablets, Memory!” The unmistakable allusion is to Hamlet, who sought his “tables” to set down the message of the Ghost. The speaker's reference to Hamlet, another superior man in disarray (“Th’ observ’d of all observers, quite, quite down!”) not only invites a flattering comparison but shows a cultivated mind solacing itself with the best that has been said and thought in the world. But the danger of awaking echoes is that they may stir an uncontrolled chain of associations by summoning their larger context. Hamlet's words are in response to a revelation from beyond the grave, a revelation that negates the easy wisdom to be had by a cultivated reading:

Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there.

(1.5.98-101)

What Arnold sets down on his tablets is a picture of a human countenance that transparently reveals the inner goodness of his beloved:

Paint, with their impetuous stress
Of inquiring tenderness,
Those frank eyes, where deep I see
An angelic gravity.

(ll. 43-46)

But Hamlet records just the reverse: “My tables! Meet it is I set it down, / That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain” (1.5.107-8). The allusion superficially supported the self-image projected in Arnold's poem, but at a deeper level, in context, it flatly contradicts Arnold's premises and his stylistic recourse to “all saws of books.” And as an extra fillip, the Shakespearean context is precisely about the untrustworthiness of the images people project.

It would seem highly unlikely that Arnold intended his allusion to be read as a subversive subtext, but it nevertheless sets up uncontrolled chains of association. All language has a life of its own in triggering endless series of associations, but Arnold's highly allusive language demonstrates with special force that attempts to channel those associations may lead to unexpected hazards. “To My Friends” is a slight poem and perhaps not too much should be made of it, but its evidently accidental generation of a subversive subtext provides a model with which to compare Arnold's most ambitious attempts to write wholly sincere love poetry in “The Buried Life” and “Dover Beach.”

SINCERITY AND BURIED VOICES

“The Buried Life” and “Dover Beach” are Arnold's clearest and most earnest efforts to find an entirely sincere poetic language. Without the dramatic framework and romantic posturings of “Switzerland,” they present themselves as direct addresses from a speaker to his beloved. Indeed, the presence of such an auditor in the poems, as Dorothy Mermin points out, creates a situation “in which the speaker can speak absolutely freely” and unselfconsciously.¹⁶ But his language, however sincere, is not unmediated utterance from the heart. Rather, as in “Switzerland,” it is highly allusive, mediated by other texts that are evidently meant to strengthen the language, to provide authority. The two poets most interestingly echoed in the poems, in fact, are Wordsworth and Milton, authors of sublime authority—Arnold had only half-jokingly written to Clough that “those who cannot read G[ree]k sh[ou]ld read nothing but Milton and parts of Wordsworth: the state should see to it.”¹⁷ Arnold's invocations of earlier poets, however, are often for the purpose of debunking them. His elegies, as Culler has argued, do not call the dead back to some form of life, but rather attempt to lay the spirits (Arnold once defined spirit as “influence” [6:290]) of the threateningly undead to deprive even the surviving words of their potency.¹⁸ And as John Hollander and Harold Bloom have both noted in passing, Arnold's allusions and echoes frequently empty the predecessor's language of its meaning.¹⁹ At their most extreme, Arnold's deflating allusions call into question the status of his own language, of poetic language generally; they generate uncontrolled intertextual reverberations and become subversive subtexts that undermine his ostensible purpose but add a deeper pathos to his poetry. They may constitute, in fact, a kind of demonic buried life beneath the surface stream of his diction.

Even more clearly than in “Switzerland,” Arnold's most ostentatiously allusive discourse in “The Buried Life” erupts into a discourse in which the speaker is evidently struggling for an austere, plain diction that can strip words down to pure denotation and so arrive at unadorned truth and avoid any illusions in love. “The Buried Life” is overtly concerned with the limitations of language from its opening lines:

Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
I feel a nameless sadness o’er me roll.
Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile!
But there’s a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest,
And thy gay smiles no anodyne.
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.

The speaker's dissatisfaction with “mocking words” is sufficiently evident in his injunction to his beloved to “hush.” But the inefficacy of language is also enacted through a kind of imitative form in the presumably accidental bathos of “Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!” and the reiterative assertions (“Yes, yes” and “we know … / We know, we know”) that seem to protest too much. The problem is not in the levity of “light words” but in a general incapacity of language to name emotional states, to communicate feeling—the “sadness” is “nameless” and the language that states only what it can honestly name is able to state almost nothing: “But there’s a something.” The difficulty is that Arnold is seeking a language purged of metaphorical or connotative meanings as he attempts to describe not what the sadness, or the soul, or the something is like but what it is. Such a purely denotative language might describe an object as in itself it really is, might even describe an object that inspires a state of feeling (Wordsworth, in an analogous situation, had been able to say “But there’s a Tree”),²⁰ but can hardly describe a feeling.

The speaker is quick to admit his failure, in a pair of rhetorical questions:

Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?

(ll. 12-15)

The questions signal a change in linguistic procedure formally as well as thematically precisely because they are rhetorical (they must be—as in “Thyrsis” the sole auditor, having been hushed, is not expected to reply). The figure of rhetoric as well as the sudden burst of metaphor—apparent in the personification of love, the lock on the heart, and the potentially speaking heart—both indicate that the speaker is willing to try a figurative language. Unfortunately the slightly mixed metaphor anticipates the considerable confusion that metaphoric language will encounter in this poem, and the section ends with an assertion that manages simultaneously to be a platitude, and to be unconvincing: “and yet / The same heart beats in every human breast!” (ll. 22-23). Ironically, the assertion would be hopelessly trite if it made sense within the context of the poem, but as Alice Stitelman has noted, it “contradicts the emphasis of all which has preceded it, and gains its emotional impact by standing as a desperate plea against the weight of the speaker's documented experience.”²¹ Or put another way, the statement, in the middle of a poem that is trying to establish a completely honest, sincere language, is effective precisely because it is untrue, a lie. Metaphoric language had led to an emotionally effective poetry, but only by betraying truth, or as the poem later puts it, it “Is eloquent, is well—but ’tis not true!” (l. 66).

The dubious assertion leads to the central metaphor of the poem, that of the “buried life,” and significantly, the central metaphor, based on a lie, leads to a tangled web. In what follows it is not clear whether our hearts and voices are benumbed by a magical “spell” (ll. 24-25) or are enchained (ll. 26-27), and what we most assuredly cannot know is stated with absolute assurance: “that which seals them hath been deep-ordained!” (l. 29). As always, the ordinance is unauthored; the passive voice allows Arnold to avoid strict mention of a God's voice, but does not provide any other authoritative legislator. The horror of emotional and verbal incapacity is set forth as a boon:

Fate, which foresaw,
How frivolous a baby man would be—
By what distractions he would be possessed,
How he would pour himself in every strife,
And well-nigh change his own identity—
That it might keep from his capricious play
His genuine self, and force him to obey
Even in his own despite his being's law,
Bade through the deep recesses of our breast
The unregarded river of our life
Pursue with indiscernible flow its way;
And that we should not see
The buried stream, and seem to be
Eddying at large in blind uncertainty,
Though driving on with it eternally.

(ll. 30-44)

The cluttered syntax of this one long sentence, the numerous qualifications, the seven lines between the subject and the predicate, the clashing metaphors of the buried self and the river of life—all of this almost, but not quite, conceals the remarkable central statement: fate decreed that we should not know ourselves so that we cannot betray ourselves. My point, however, is not to sort through the tangle of these lines but only to note how the attempt at absolute honesty, apparent in the qualifications and explanations, leads not to an austere, plain diction and a lucid statement but to an absurd assertion uttered by a disembodied voice and couched in a language that approaches inarticulateness as its complex structures begin to collapse under their own weight.²²

The poem does not, however, end with a bang as the tower of Babel collapses, but—and this is the important point—just as it approaches inarticulateness, it becomes densely allusive, and far more lucid:

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life

(ll. 46-49)

The language unmistakably summons Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey”: “But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din / Of towns and cities”²³ and just a few lines later, the speaker's “longing to inquire / Into the mystery of this heart which beats” (ll. 51-52) may call to mind Wordsworth's famous phrase “the burthen of the mystery” in conjunction with his efforts to lift the burdens that “Have hung upon the beatings of my heart” (ll. 38, 54). Further, as the speaker listens carefully for some sound of his buried life, he hears strange resonances:

                              vague and forlorn,
From the soul's subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.

(ll. 72-76)

The echoes are echoes of echoes, recollections of Wordsworthian recollections:

Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day.(24)

As in “Isolation. To Marguerite,” the allusiveness introduces a new, weightier level of discourse, and the authoritative presence of Wordsworth, especially, in the poem's subtext is at least initially reassuring. Wordsworth's experience would seem to confirm the possibility of easing “the burthen of the mystery” and, more, his reassuring resonance within the breast reveals that the buried life and language, especially poetic language, may not be incompatible after all. Also, Wordsworth is the poet best suited to help the speaker, for as Arnold stated in “Memorial Verses,” Wordsworth's “soothing voice” (l. 35) had the “healing power” (l. 63) to set free just such benumbed souls and enchained hearts:

He found us when the age had bound
Our souls in its benumbing round;
He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.

(ll. 45-47)

Certainly with Wordsworth's “soothing voice” running in a deep subtextual stream, the surface currents of “The Buried Life” smooth out—the syntax becomes clear and the rhythms are no longer tortuous. It would seem that Arnold is indeed using allusions, as one might have conjectured, to provide voices of reassurance and authority, to give resonance and plenitude to his language.

Allusions are rarely so unambiguously reassuring, however, and a brief consideration of Arnold's responses to Wordsworth's influence reveals how troubled the subtextual stream of “The Buried Life” is likely to be. Arnold, of course, had known Wordsworth as a neighbor in the Lake district, and respected him as the greatest English poet since Milton, but as his numerous critical comments on the matter reveal, he was in some ways ambivalent about the older poet's achievement. Wordsworth had “natural magic,” could show a “grand style,” and often showed “moral profundity,” but his “eyes avert their ken / From half of human fate,” presumably because like the other romantics he did not “know enough,” had not read enough books.²⁵ Arnold's complex response to Wordsworth's work has been exhaustively studied, and it is not necessary to review it here in detail, but a look at how he laid Wordsworth's perturbed spirit to rest in “Memorial Verses” will help to show how Arnold's having read enough books complicates his allusions to Wordsworth in “The Buried Life” and in “Dover Beach.” The allusions in fact open up general problems of intertextuality that complicate matters far beyond, for example, a Bloomian agon in which Arnold combats his ghostly predecessor face to face.

The sense that Wordsworth's voice in Arnold's poem might be reassuring is encouraged by a passage from “Memorial Verses” in which Wordsworth is said to restore our innocence:

He laid us as we lay at birth
On the cool flowery lap of earth. …
Our youth returned; for there was shed
On spirits that had long been dead,
Spirits dried up and closely furled,
The freshness of the early world.

(ll. 48-49, 54-57)

Since Arnold consistently blamed the complexities of the age—its “multitudinousness,” its rush, its “unpoetrylessness”—for benumbed senses and failures of communication, this return to Eden would seem a perfect cure for the ills of “The Buried Life.” Moreover, the return to Eden is still more suggestive when read in conjunction with Arnold's somewhat later comments on “natural magic” as a kind of Adamic naming that accomplishes the goal of the speaker in “The Buried Life” by perfectly expressing its object. The idea that Wordsworth's language has “magical” restorative powers associated with a kind of hidden, underground life is, moreover, strengthened by Arnold's association of it with “the clear song of Orpheus” in Hades. Once again, such words of power drifting upward from the buried life ought to be heartening.

And yet the full implications of “Memorial Verses” raise disturbing questions about echoes of Wordsworth elsewhere. In the first place, Orpheus almost, but only almost, redeemed Eurydice from Hades—he was able to get only himself out of hell, and not to help others. Also, “natural magic” names only the “outward world” (3:33) so that Wordsworth's ability to say “But there’s a Tree” will not provide an alternative to the feeble utterance of the man looking inward, who can still say only “but there’s a something.” Further, “Memorial Verses,” as Culler has argued, does not ultimately affirm the continued potency of Wordsworth's voice but rather denies it by characterizing Wordsworth as “the last survivor of an idyllic age which has long since passed away.”²⁶ Wordsworth can no longer restore the freshness of the early world; he is left well dead and, as the opening lines of the poem make clear, well silenced: “The last poetic voice is dumb— / We stand today by Wordsworth's tomb” (ll. 4-5). The notion of a dumb and entombed voice rising from its buried life begins to take on macabre implications, and the flat statement that Wordsworth's “voice is dumb” seems a direct answer to the fundamental question of “The Buried Life”: “But we, my love!—doth a like spell benumb / Our hearts, our voices? must we too be dumb?” (ll. 24-25).

Intriguingly, and pertinently, “Memorial Verses” has a buried life of its own that still further erodes the possibility of genuine poetic communication. In the very lines that seem to place Wordsworth in a primal state of innocence, the subtext reaches back to a still earlier predecessor. Arnold's lines “He laid us as we lay at birth / On the cool flowery lap of earth” recall Gray's description of Shakespeare, a still earlier, still more magical voice: “Far from the sun and summer gale, / In thy green lap was Nature's Darling laid.”²⁷ And the general sentiment of the whole, that the age of poetry is past partly because, benumbed, we can no longer feel deeply, recalls eighteenth-century lamentations of the loss of feeling and lyric power, and in particular Collins's “Ode to Fear,” in which the belated poet echoes Milton's “Il Penseroso” as he seeks from Fear the emotional intensity of Shakespeare: “Hither again thy fury deal, / Teach me but once like him to feel” (ll. 68-69). Collins's lines are a subversive undercurrent beneath Arnold's lament that in these latter days “Others will teach us how to dare” and how to bear, “But who, ah! who, will make us feel?” (ll. 64-67). Arnold does not summon the voices of Shakespeare and Milton to show that those reassuring voices do indeed survive; rather he echoes fruitless pleas for the return of those potent spirits. But their absence indicates that they are silenced, as Wordsworth is. The voices that do survive are the ineffectual voices of Gray and Collins, Arnold's kindred spirits as the talented victims of an unpoetical age.²⁸

The displacement of Milton by Collins is especially disturbing since Arnold apparently considered his poem in some sense Miltonic, for he wrote (albeit somewhat facetiously) to Clough that he had “dirged W. W. in the grand style,”²⁹ a style that he associated almost exclusively, in English poetry at least, with Milton. Further, the Miltonic grand style, as Arnold defined it, is the perfect vehicle for a modern poetry that should be able to overcome the problem of belatedness and the consequent unavailability of natural magic by resorting to extreme allusiveness. Arnold divides the grand style into two types, the “simple” and the “severe,” of which the “simple” is the more “magical” but is unfortunately not available to modern poets. The “grand style severe,” best seen in Milton, “is much more imitable” (though “this a little spoils its charm”) and it “comes from saying a thing with a kind of intense compression, or in an allusive, brief, almost haughty way” (1:189-90). Still more pertinently, Arnold described Miltonic style in 1849 as designed “to compose and elevate the mind by a sustained tone, numerous allusions, and a grand style.”³⁰ The style would seem to enable the poet to make a positive use of the “multitudinousness” of his age, the “height to which knowledge is come,” rather than being burdened by it.³¹ And, indeed, Arnold suggested in a letter to Clough that he was making an effort to achieve such a style: “The poet's matter being the hitherto experience of the world, and his own, increases with every century. … For me you may often hear my sinews cracking under the effort to unite matter.” Yet within the same letter he made two observations that suggest why Milton and Shakespeare are not heard in “Memorial Verses,” in his version of the grand style. In the first place, they are too “curious and exquisite” because they did not have to contend with “the multitude of new thoughts and feelings” that “a modern has” (they are, presumably, like Wordsworth in this), and second, imitation of the great masters is to be avoided as a sign of “the Decadence of a literature”: “One of the factors of its decadent condition indeed, is this—that new authors attach themselves to the poetic expression the founders of a literature have flowered into, which may be learned by a sensitive person, to the neglect of an inward poetic life.”³² To save his own “inward poetic life” from decay, the modern must keep out the spirits (influences!) of the dead. The weaker spirits of Collins and Gray may be allowed in as reassurance that the ghosts of Wordsworth and Milton have been well laid.

All of this leads us back to the disturbing implication of Wordsworth's voice suddenly entering into “The Buried Life” to save it from inarticulateness and even to introduce a loftiness that seems to approximate a grand style. Wordsworth's resurrection in the buried life ought surely to constitute not a healing power but a threat to the speaker's “inward poetic life.” A closer look at the passage shows that this is so:

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life.

Wordsworth's presence seems, at first, innocent enough. The passage from “Tintern Abbey” describes how the inward life of the mind is restored to tranquility as the remembered past, a kind of buried life, wells up into present consciousness. But in opening up his verse to Wordsworth's voice, Arnold's “inward poetic life” suddenly begins to be crowded out by other, possibly more dangerous voices. The next voice, in fact, is Satan's, as the Father of Lies speaks of his “Unspeakable desire to see and know / All these his wondrous works, but chiefly Man.”³³ The lines occur as Satan is lying to Uriel, in an incident that Milton used to emphasize the dangers of hypocrisy, of dissembling words. The situation is peculiarly akin to the echo of Hamlet's horror of hypocrisy in “A Memory Picture”—in both cases the speaker is aiming at complete sincerity while his language is ineluctably summoning references to hypocrisy as a hidden, often indiscernible evil. Even the most sincere speech may veil a lurking evil. Within Arnold's poem about his desire to speak the unspeakable, to name what is nameless, Satan's precedent must be unsettling.

Perhaps Milton's voice drowning out Wordsworth at this point should not be surprising since Arnold argued, much later, that Wordsworth had “no assured poetic style of his own, like Milton” (9:52) but often seemed to take on Milton's style. Written long after Arnold had himself stopped writing poetry, long after he had ceased to be troubled by the anxieties of poetic influence, Arnold's comment betrays no sense that Wordsworth's poetic integrity might have been threatened by Milton's influence. Yet the young poet of “The Buried Life,” aware that he did not have Wordsworth's power of natural magic, of writing as though “Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote his poem for him” (9:52), might well have felt threatened by the spectacle of one poetic voice welling up from his buried text only to be inundated by yet another. Indeed the Miltonic voice does not merely follow the Wordsworthian, but from the first is a still more deeply buried subtext beneath the Wordsworthian subtext, for the Wordsworthian lines may have conjured in Arnold's mind the famous simile that compares Satan in Eden to “one who long in populous City pent” (Paradise Lost 9.445) has temporarily, but only temporarily, escaped from hellish confinement to pastoral innocence and freedom. It is impossible to say to what extent any of these echoes are deliberate, but certainly in this case the Miltonic lines had made an impression on Arnold, who once jokingly wrote to Clough that his “present Labours may be shadowed forth under the Figure of Satan, perambulating, under the most unfavorable circumstances, a populous neighborhood.”³⁴ The reference, however submerged it may be in “The Buried Life,” is extremely telling, for like the echo of Satan's hypocrisy, it calls to mind the last moments before the language of the “early world” is corrupted, the last moments before Satan's convincing lies seduced Eve and put an end to the simplicity and magic of Adamic naming. Further, the particular lines from Milton were especially apt to set a chain of echoes dinning in Arnold's ear for, as John Hollander has shown, the lines resound through Coleridge and Keats and, significantly, become explicitly associated with writers in crowded cities as Coleridge addresses “Bards in city garret pent” (“To the Nightingale”) and Charles Lamb pining for nature while “In the great City pent” (“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”).³⁵ The moment Arnold chooses to tap the grand style of allusive poetry, the moment he allows poets and poetry to surface in his text, he is inundated by lies and a Babel of ancestral voices. In the next fifty lines he will repeatedly echo the voices of his poetic forefathers, Coleridge and Wordsworth and, possibly, even Thomas Arnold.³⁶

My allusion to the ancestral voices of “Kubla Khan” is, of course, deliberate, for “Kubla Khan” emerges as yet another precursor of “The Buried Life.” The central metaphor of both poems is a subterranean river that casts up mysterious voices. In both poems the river seems harmless so long as it can be placed in a comfortable pastoral setting—“meandering with a mazy motion” in “Kubla Khan” and gliding through the meadows with a “winding murmur” in “The Buried Life”—on its way to a reassuringly quiet end in a “lifeless ocean” in Coleridge's poem and in “the sea where it goes” in Arnold's. But also in both poems the river is associated with a frightening underworld that casts up disturbing voices. In “Kubla Khan” the sounds are of a “woman wailing for her demon lover!” and of a general “tumult” in which can be discerned “Ancestral voices prophesying war!” The Arnoldian river murmurs less dramatically, but disturbingly nevertheless:

                    vague and forlorn,
From the soul's subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.

(ll. 72-76)

Further, both poems are ultimately concerned at a deep level with the speaker's capacity to control these voices, and so to be able to express himself fully, even magically.

Like the other voices making themselves heard in the poem, Coleridge's dishearteningly suggests that mankind is fallen away from the state in which perfect language is possible, that poetic language is fallen, a hubbub of contending voices from the underworld. Also, to make room for his own voice, Arnold must clear away Coleridge's by revising the prior poem, by showing that it is not the ultimate statement that would make Arnold's redundant. Arnold swerves from the Coleridgean perspective in a fundamentally important respect. Coleridge's speaker considers the demonic voices of the underworld as the sources, if only he could revive them, of a visionary power; Arnold's, with a Victorian distrust of the visionary, hears them as seductively attractive lies that can only bring “A melancholy into all our day.”

The extent to which Arnold rejected the demonic lies of poetry, and the consequence of this rejection, can best be appreciated by considering his conclusion, which claims a triumph, but in such carefully honest language that it undoes itself. The speaker claims to have found a language that perfectly expresses inward states (“And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know” [l. 87]), but in fact he makes no attempt to communicate his feelings. Rather he simply returns to the metaphor of the buried stream, spells it out as his “life's flow” (l. 88), and affirms that he can now not only hear it but even “sees / The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze” (ll. 89-90). The actualization of the metaphor is forced, since the speaker is not willing to let it stand as an objective correlative for a state of feeling but insists on placing the physical stream inside the breast. Obviously the speaker does not in fact see such a stream, even though his eyes are apparently turned around in his head (“the eye sinks inward” [l. 86])—and in fact the pretense at seeing is betrayed by the forced rhyme that obliges him to claim even that “he sees … the breeze.” The closing section, unable to build on such a shaky basis, claims much less:

And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.

(ll. 91-98)

Though this ending has been called a “moment of joy and insight,”³⁷ it seems to me far from joyful. The lines achieve their calm not by coming to terms with the murmurs of the buried life but by silencing them. Unlike the speaker of “Kubla Khan,” who wants to become the vehicle for the subterranean song, to achieve a language of plenitude and redemptive power, the speaker here wants only to silence it and so, by implication, to empty language of its seductive poetical delusions. The calm is not achieved through a full inner life, but rather through an acceptance of death. The goal of life is the “elusive shadow, rest,” and the poem ends with the anticipation of life itself and the buried stream emptying themselves into the sea, into the final calm of death. Further, the speaker, fighting to be honest, cannot claim to have achieved even the minimal goal of rest, but only a “lull in the hot race,” and cannot claim knowledge of his origin or end, but only that “he thinks he knows.” In short, there is no insight, and there certainly is no joy, only calm. The most that can be said of such calm is said at the close of “Youth and Calm”:

Youth dreams a bliss on this side death.
It dreams a rest, if not more deep,
More grateful than this marble sleep;
It hears a voice within it tell:
Calm's not life's crown, though calm
is well.
’Tis all perhaps which man acquires,
But ’tis not what our youth desires.

(ll. 19-25)

“Calm,” here, is found “in the tomb” (l. 15), and the calm of “The Buried Life” is not much better. What is more, the speaker, as has been frequently noted, has completely abandoned the attempt to read his lover's “inmost soul” (l. 11), and in his futile attempt to understand even his own soul he is left entirely alone, isolated by his failure to find an adequate language. In spite of itself, the poem expresses a sense of solipsistic entrapment, or entombment, and anticipates Pater's famous assertion that “each one of us” is bound within “that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.”³⁸ Emptying the language of his predecessors of its power, Arnold ends by emptying his own, ends with a return to silence. Seeking a calm of Wordsworthian repletion, the poem ends with a calm that, fully examined, is far more akin to the Tennysonian calm of deep grief, or death:

                    And in my heart, if calm at all,
If any calm, a calm despair;
Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,
                    And waves that sway themselves in rest,
                    And dead calm in that noble breast
Which heaves but with the heaving deep.

(In Memoriam, section 11)

I am by no means contending that Arnold intended to deconstruct his own poem, or intended to include a subtextual current of allusion that would undermine his own language and poetic language generally. Indeed, Arnold presumably saw “The Buried Life” as a fairly tranquil poem about the power of love to unlock the heart and lips. But poetic language has a life of its own, and beneath the surface the poem becomes a subtextual battle that ends in universal casualties. “The Buried Life” is consequently a confused poem that gains its genuine pathos in large measure by its valiant, if losing, struggle for a language of affirmative power. But Arnold's greatest lyric, “Dover Beach,” exhibits none of this confusion because, though it fights the same battle as “The Buried Life,” it never assumes a victory.

Like “The Buried Life,” “Dover Beach” is addressed to a beloved in a situation that demands, and seems to make possible, sincerity. According to Mermin's excellent discussion of the poems from this perspective, in “The Buried Life” the speaker realizes that “all he can sincerely say is that he would like to be sincere,” but in “Dover Beach,” she argues, Arnold produced his “one poem in which he shows communication from speaker to auditor as open, direct, complete, and wholly unproblematic.”³⁹ I will argue, however, that like “The Buried Life,” “Dover Beach” ends with a desolating sense of aloneness, and that its attempted austerity of diction is similarly undermined by the subtextual voices of Wordsworth and Milton. Also like “The Buried Life,” it is a poem that in subtle ways is about its own decomposition. In what is probably the best essay to date on “Dover Beach,” Ruth Pitman has convincingly argued that even the landscape—the cliffs and the shoreline—is not as solid as it at first appears. The opening description of the cliffs “glimmering,” the light that “gleams and is gone,” and the “grating” of pebbles on the shore suggests an erosion of the shoreline, a reminder of what the geologists had been telling the Victorians about the impermanence of the solidest features of the earth itself. The passage is analogous to Tennyson's description of geological transformations in In Memoriam:

The hills are shadows, and they flow
                    From form to form, and nothing stands;
                    They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

(section 123)

Further, Pitman argues, the physical decomposition of the landscape suggests an analogous decomposition of meaning in the Victorian worldview—the changed sense of time, the general sense of impermanence, the idea of living in a world in a constant state of flux and decay not only undermined Christian faith but left nothing at all solid to lean on. The decaying shoreline is precisely the spot to ponder the withdrawal of faith from the world, and the loss of a stable worldview. And finally, Pitman adds, erosion of the land and the decay of faith are both reflected in an analogous erosion of poetic form. The poem, she points out, “is made up of a series of incomplete sonnets: erosion of form matches erosion of meaning.”⁴⁰ I will not recapitulate her perceptive and thorough analysis of the poem's prosody to support this claim, except to note the obvious. The first two sections each consist of fourteen lines that suggest but do not achieve strict sonnet form, and except for a short (three foot) opening line, the last section emulates the octave of a sonnet, but closes with a single, climactic line instead of a sestet—as though the final five lines had been eroded.

Not only is the form decomposing but, as in “The Buried Life,” the poem's metaphors tend to be self-destructive. As Elizabeth Gitter has pointed out, Arnold introduces Sophocles' metaphorical interpretation of the sea only to reject it and replace it with a thought independent of the actual sound: “The vehicle of this new metaphor is not the ‘tremulous cadence’ of the waves of Dover Beach, but a steady, ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.’ And the metaphor of the continuously ebbing Sea of Faith is suggested to the poet by the meaning of the note of sadness he hears, not by the way it sounds.”⁴¹ Though Gitter's interpretation of her excellent observation is different from mine, it seems to me that this severance of the mind's metaphoric creation from external actuality, this breakdown of metaphoric connection of mind and other, signals the same kind of solipsistic isolation as in “The Buried Life.” Arnold's speaker listens to the rising sound of distant waters but hears only what is already within him. He contrasts sharply with the figure of Wordsworth on Mount Snowdon, hearing in the rising sound of waters a proof of a universally and benevolently meaningful world outside of the self. Indeed, as U. C. Knoepflmacher has pointed out, Arnold draws Wordsworth into the poem from its very first lines. And this time the allusion is so sustained, and so pertinent, that Arnold must surely have intended it to be noted.

The allusion in the opening section is to Wordsworth generally and, as Knoepflmacher has noted, is in particular to the sonnet “It Is a Beauteous Evening.”⁴² Within his sonnet Wordsworth is describing the sounds and significance of the sea to a child (though it is not mentioned in the poem, the setting is, significantly, the shore of the English Channel, though on the French side):

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity;
The gentleness of heaven broods o’er the Sea:
Listen! the mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder—everlastingly.

The echoes in the opening lines of “Dover Beach” are immediately obvious:

The sea is calm to-night.
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.

The opening “calm,” the stylistic recourse to flat copulative verbs, the importance of the sea's sound, and especially the request to the companion to “Listen!” are all caught up in Arnold's lines. In the diction, the choice of such words as “calm,” “full,” “sweet,” and “tranquil,” the lines invoke a general Wordsworthian sense of epiphany. But the undertow is treacherous. The “grating roar” calls in a note of sadness utterly unlike the Wordsworthian undersong of the “sad music of humanity” that, Knoepflmacher notes, is described in “Tintern Abbey” as “Nor harsh, nor grating.”⁴³ Further, in this particular context, the meaningless “grating roar” displaces the powerful and holy presence of a “mighty Being” whose bang is replaced with a whimper, whose eternal motion and everlasting thunder are replaced by an “eternal note of sadness.” For this reason—because the world and Wordsworth are emptied of their mythic presence—the calm of Arnold's lines is, as in “The Buried Life,” a calm not of repletion but of emptiness. In fact, even the simplest words are emptied of their meaning in Arnold's poem. Wordsworth's serenity is characteristically achieved by the plenitude of his verbs of being—in the first six lines of his octave the word is is used four times, and is reinforced by the word Being. The word is is not a mere linking verb, but an affirmation of divine presence, a transcendental signifier. It is akin, indeed, to the word broods that summons up the transcendent and creative presence of the Holy Spirit. But Arnold's four uses of is in his opening six lines cannot have this force. As we have seen, Arnold later scorned the idea that is and be were meaningful metaphysical terms, and he mocked the notion that “being was supposed to be something absolute, which stood under all things,”⁴⁴ but even within “Dover Beach” it is clear that is is not informed with transcendental presence but simply links nouns to adjectives, making the minimal verbal statement. Indeed, in three cases, “The sea is calm,” “The tide is full,” and “sweet is the night-air,” the verb is unnecessary and the adjectives could be used directly: the calm sea, the full tide, the sweet night-air. And in the fourth case the is signifies no presence, but absence: “the light … is gone.” The metaphysical emptiness of Arnold's language is, of course, analogous to the poem's general description of the emptiness of faithless Victorian life, an emptiness most emphatically stated near the end of the poem in a desolating series of denials:

                                        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.

(ll. 30-34)

As John Hollander has recently argued, verbal echoes may be a sign not of repletion but of reverberations in hollow or empty landscapes,⁴⁵ and certainly the resounding of Wordsworth's voice in the meaningless landscape of “Dover Beach” seems to be just that.

Even in these negations the voices of Milton and Wordsworth reverberate hollowly. The “world, which seems / To lie before us,” Ronald A. Sharp has recently noted,⁴⁶ is a skeptical, attenuated version of Milton's

The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie
way.

(Paradise Lost, 12.646-49)

Not surprisingly, by this time, mediating between Milton and Arnold is the voice of Wordsworth from the 1850 Prelude: “the earth is all before me” (1.14) and “the road lies plain before me” (1.641). But these voices and visions from the grand style are denied; Arnold is cut off not only from Providence, and from the clarity of Wordsworthian purpose, but also, of course, from the language of affirmation that contributes to their grandeur. Yet the prior voices do make themselves heard, and not always to be simply rejected. Whether deliberately or not, the voice of Milton—or more accurately Milton's Satan—is heard in a devastatingly subversive subtext. As Martin Bidney has recently pointed out, the words “neither joy nor love” are lifted directly from Paradise Lost. The loss of Wordsworthian joy⁴⁷ is associated with Satan's description of Hell as he enviously sees the embrace of Adam and Eve, who

                                        shall enjoy their fill
Of bliss on bliss, while I to Hell am thrust,
Where neither joy, nor love, but fierce desire,
Among our other torments not the least,
Still unfulfill’d with pain of longing pines.

(4.507-11)

Bidney effectively notes the significance of this: “Now that the world has become Hell, the embrace of two lovers stranded amid the dark expanse of aimless fury is a very precarious Eden indeed—an Eden internal, vulnerable, isolated, intermittent at best. The poet tenderly holds out to his beloved the prospect of hope, but in the same sentence, almost in the same breath, he depicts their earthly world in the very words used by a despairing Devil to describe an eternal Hell.”⁴⁸ The allusion also has a dark significance for the possibilities of language. Arnold, who in a very different context once asked where, in a contaminated language, he could “find language innocent enough” to express the “spotless purity of [his] intentions” (3:275), now cries “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!” (ll. 29-30) and ironically mouths the words of the Father of Lies, of an archfiend agonizing over the frustration of an unsatisfied sexual desire. Once again, though the Wordsworthian voice may be neutralized, demonic voices will continue to rise from the abyss and subvert the language.

But anterior even to the voice of Satan is another voice, yet more devastating in its implications. As Culler and Pitman have both noted, the speaker of “Dover Beach” is not actually situated on the beach, but on the cliff known—and known to Arnold—as “Shakespeare's cliff” after the cliff scene in King Lear.⁴⁹ The cliff scene has been lurking in the background all along, but King Lear is brought into the verbal texture of the poem by only one word—though a highly charged poetic one—in the closing simile:

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

(ll. 35-37)

Pitman, who notes how thoroughly the closing lines are a tissue of poeticisms, how the plain is “made up of literary allusion and [is] itself a simile,” sees a faint hope in the speaker's ability to use the literary tradition to rebuild after all other meaning has been lost: “All that is left is what the mind can construct, from King Lear, perhaps, or from Thucydides, not a secure or certain physical place: ‘And we are here as on a darkling plain.’ The coast lights, gleaming or glimmering, have gone out, like the Fool's candle and left us without a guide, unable to discern the perspective of landscape outside ourselves, confined to the ‘darkling plain’ of our own minds. (‘So out went the candle, and we were left darkling’; King Lear 1.4.226).”⁵⁰ But the situation is even grimmer than this, for the subtext of the poems has consistently implied that our building blocks, those fragments of the tradition, may be all we have, but they are lies.

Indeed, the situational allusion to the cliff scene makes this painfully clear. Arnold has been listening to the “grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back” but Edgar has told Gloucester that

                                        The murmuring surge
That on th’ unnumber’d idle pebble chafes
Cannot be heard so high.

(4.6.21-23)

Arnold has once again echoed a precursor to correct his lie—and of course Edgar is a liar. He was not at the top of a cliff, but was standing on a flat plain, a “darkling plain” for poor blinded Gloucester, weaving an elaborate poetical lie to save the inhabitant of the darkling plain from utter despair and suicide. Gloucester, of course, thinks he is on the cliffs of Dover, and after he thinks he has jumped off them, he presumably thinks he is on Dover Beach—but in fact there is no escape from his plight, from his darkling plain. The implication of Arnold's allusion is that the lies of poetry may save us from despair, as they saved the deluded Gloucester, but lies they remain and cannot alter our existential state, which is always “as on a darkling plain.” The allusiveness of “Dover Beach” helps to make it one of the most powerful and compelling poems in the language, but not because the voices of past poets provide the kind of authoritative language Arnold usually sought. Rather, the poem is compelling in its courageous struggle to set aside the lies, the false consolations of such precursors as Wordsworth (a kind of Edgar figure) and to battle for a true standing ground, however barren and desolate. Even if he is “as on a darkling plain,” the speaker wants to be able to state, with an existential truth unavailable to the blind and duped Gloucester, that “we are here.”

In his 1863 essay on Maurice de Guérin, Arnold quoted a passage that demonstrates his awareness of the extreme difficulties of finding a language unadulterated by the words of previous authors: “‘When I begin a subject, my self conceit,’ (says this exquisite artist) ‘imagines I am doing wonders; and when I have finished, I see nothing but a wretched made-up imitation, composed of odds and ends of colour stolen from other people's palettes, and tastelessly mixed together on mine.’ Such was his passion for perfection” (3:35). The problem is not with deliberate allusions, but with a language so overused that uncontrollable echoes and chains of association are inevitable. And perhaps Arnold's turn from poetry to prose resulted in part from his recognition of an element of “wretched made-up imitation” in his poetry, of his inability to forge a language entirely his own. Certainly when he made a point of deliberately exploiting the tradition by mimicking past poets in such works as Sohrab and Rustum, Balder Dead, and Merope he was able to achieve little more than lifeless pastiche. The echoes and allusions in his love poetry, however, are extremely vital, uncontrollably so. Nevertheless, Arnold does not use the voices of the poetic tradition as words of power and authority to confirm his own vision. In fact, “Dover Beach” contrasts sharply with such a poem as Swinburne's “On the Cliffs,” also about hearing the sea and other voices on an eroding cliff by a “distant northern sea,” for whereas Swinburne heard the voices of Sappho—and of Wordsworth, and even of Arnold's “Dover Beach”—as filling the landscape with meaning, Arnold heard the voices of Sophocles and Wordsworth only to reject and deny them, to empty the landscape of their presence. Paradoxically, in his greatest poem the greatest of all defenders of the poetic tradition found himself encumbered by it, and struggled to clear it away. But perhaps it was precisely the resistance against a living and recalcitrant language, the battle to control intertextual echoes and subordinate them to his own purposes, that enabled Arnold to produce his finest poems. The model for Arnold's battle with his poetic forefathers, then, is not a Bloomian agon, an armed battle against a single combatant, but a much harder, less glorious encounter with the protean, many-voiced forces of a seductive and betraying poetic tradition.

Notes

1. [E. D. H.] Johnson, [The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry: Sources of the Poetic Imagination in Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1952)], p. 151.

2. Eliot, “The Three Voices of Poetry,” in On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), pp. 97-98.

3. [Park] Honan, Matthew Arnold: A Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), chap. 7. For more on the Marguerite debate, see Miriam Allott, “Arnold and ‘Marguerite’—Continued,” in Victorian Poetry 23 (1985):125-43, and in the same issue, Honan, “The Character of Marguerite in Arnold's Switzerland,” pp. 145-59.

4. Buckler, [On the Poetry of Matthew Arnold: Essays in Critical Reconstruction (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1982)] p. 68.

5. Letters of Matthew Arnold, [1848-1888, 2 vols., ed. George W. E. Russell (New York: Macmillan, 1896)] 1:11.

6. [G. Robert] Stange, [Matthew Arnold: The Poetas Humanist (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967),] p. 222.

7. For the publication history of the poems, see Paull F. Baum, Ten Studies in the Poetry of Matthew Arnold (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 79-84, and Stange, pp. 216-32.

8. How the two poems were originally related is not entirely clear. “Isolation. To Marguerite” was not published until 1857 (as “To Marguerite”—the present title was not bestowed until 1869), and “To Marguerite—Continued” was not given its present title until 1869 but was originally entitled “To Marguerite, in Returning a Volume of the Letters of Ortis” (1852), then “To Marguerite” (1853, 1854), and then “Isolation” (1857). Still, the identical stanza forms, the overlapping titles, the publication in sequence from 1857 on, and the final titles all indicate their eventual relationship, and strongly imply an initial connection.

9. Buckler, p. 65.

10. Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 42-43.

11. Tillotson, “Yes: In the Sea of Life,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 3 (1952):364, 346.

12. Roper, [Arnold's Poetic Landscapes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1969),] p. 156.

13. The poems thus admirably fit the theoretical model of Michael Riffaterre's Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1978), in which the completed poem is seen as a series of variations on a “pre-existent word group” (p. 23) called a “hypogram.”

14. Tillotson, p. 347. According to Kenneth Allott, Saintsbury, who first pointed out the reference to Pendennis, chap. 16, called the poem “simply an extension of a phrase in Pendennis.” Notes in Poems, p. 129.

15. Honan, pp. 149-58.

16. [Dorothy] Mermin, [The Audience in the Poem: Five Victorian Poets (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1983),] p. 97.

17. [The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Howard Foster Lowry (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1932)], p. 97. According to J. B. Broadbent, Arnold's echoes of Milton, Wordsworth, and the Bible provide, at least in Sohrab and Rustum, precisely the desired tone of authority and, moreover, reveal the poet as “a man confident—for all he may say elsewhere—in the value of his own civilization.” Broadbent also quotes Arnold's admission that he had indeed imitated Milton's manner, “but Milton is a sufficiently great master to imitate.” See his “Milton and Arnold,” Essays in Criticism 6 (1956):406.

18. See the chapter entitled “The Use of Elegy” in Imaginative Reason [: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966)], pp. 232-86. Culler characteristically remarks of some that “they are not so much elegies as attempts on Arnold's part to exorcise an evil spirit which had formerly dwelt within him” (p. 246).

19. Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), p. 90. Bloom, [The] Anxiety [of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973)], p. 56.

20. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” l. 51.

21. Stitelman, “Lyrical Process in Three Poems by Matthew Arnold,” Victorian Poetry 15 (1977):136.

22. Others have commented on this confusion. See, for example, Allott's note in Poems, pp. 287-88, and for a more extended discussion, Roper, pp. 173-77.

23. Noted in Poems, p. 289.

24. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” ll. 151-53. The allusion is noted in Poems, p. 290.

25. “But surely the one thing wanting to make Wordsworth an even greater poet than he is,—his thought richer, and his influence of wider application,—was that he should have read more books” (3:262).

26. Culler, p. 235.

27. The allusion to Gray's “The Progress of Poesy,” ll. 84-85, is noted in Poems.

28. The point about Gray is made in “The Study of Poetry” (9:181) and Collins is drawn into it in the essay “Thomas Gray” (9:204), but for an earlier comment to the same effect see Arnold's 1849 letter in Letters to Clough, p. 99.

29. Letters to Clough, p. 115.

30. Ibid., p. 100.

31. Ibid., p. 111.

32. Ibid., pp. 64-65.

33. The echo of Paradise Lost 3.662-63 is noted in Poems.

34. Quoted by Culler, p. 52.

35. Hollander, p. 80.

36. For the possible allusion to Thomas Arnold, see Poems, p. 291.

37. Strange, p. 176.

38. Pater, Conclusion, The Renaissance, p. 187.

39. Mermin, pp. 97, 106.

40. Pitman, “On Dover Beach,” Essays in Criticism 23 (1973):129.

41. Gitter, “Undermined Metaphors in Arnold's Poetry,” Victorian Poetry 16 (1978):278.

42. [U. C.] Knoepflmacher, [“Dover Beach Revisited: The Wordsworthian Matrix in the Poetry of Matthew Arnold,” Victorian Poetry 1 (1963):] pp. 21-22. Michael Timko also discusses the poem as a response to Wordsworthian poetry and thought—he sees it as “Arnold's strongest poetic declaration of his break with the Romantics, especially Wordsworth, and his most direct and explicit denunciation of Wordsworth's ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality.’” (“Wordsworth's ‘Ode’ and Arnold's ‘Dover Beach’: Celestial Light and Confused Alarms,” Cithara 13 [1973]:53).

43. Knoepflmacher, pp. 21-22.

44. See pp. 15-17.

45. Hollander, p. 12.

46. Sharp, “A Note on Allusion in ‘Dover Beach,’” English Language Notes 21 (1983):53. Sharp points out the echoes of The Prelude as well.

47. In his “Address to the Wordsworth Society,” Arnold referred to “what is perhaps Wordsworth's most distinct virtue of all—his power of happiness and hope, his ‘deep power of joy’” (10:133). For Arnold's consistent association of Wordsworth with joy, see [Leon] Gottfried, [Matthew Arnold and the Romantics (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press)] chap. 2.

48. Bidney, “Of the Devil's Party: Undetected Words of Milton's Satan in Arnold's ‘Dover Beach,’” Victorian Poetry 20 (1982):89.

49. Culler, p. 39.

50. Pitman, p. 124.