Matthew+Arnold

= Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) = Matthew Arnold was born in 1822 and died in 1888. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford University. In 1844, after finishing his undergraduate degree at Oxford, he returned to Rugby, where he was a student and an award winning poet, as a teacher of classics. After marrying in 1851, Arnold began work as a government school inspector and throughout his thirty-five years n this position, Arnold developed an interest in education, which helped build his poetic works. //Empedocles on Etna// and //Poems// established Matthew Arnold’s reputation as a poet and in 1857 he was offered a position, as the Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Arnold became the first professor to teach in English instead than Latin. During this time, he wrote the most of his most famous poets. //Essays in Criticism// and //Culture and Anarchy// are poems in which he shows ideas that to the highest degree mirror the principal values of the Victorian era.

Arnold's poetry was often about psychological isolation. In //To Marguerit//, Arnold revises John Donne's, a famous songwriters, assertion that "No man is an island". Arnold, suggesting that we, "mortals" are indeed, "in the sea of life enisled." Other well-known poems, such as //Dover Beach//, link the problem of isolation with what Arnold saw as the decreasing faith of his time. Despite his own religious doubts, a source of great anxiety for him, in several essays Arnold sought to establish the essential truth of Christianity. His most influential essays, however, were those on literary topics. In "The Function of Criticism" (1865) and "The Study of Poetry" (1880) Arnold called for a new epic poetry: a poetry that would address the moral needs of his readers, "to animate and ennoble them." Arnold's arguments, for a renewed religious faith and an acceptance of classical aesthetics and principles, are representatives of normal Victorian logical concerns.

=**Poems**=

__Absence__

IN THIS fair stranger’s eyes of grey Thine eyes, my love, I see. I shudder: for the passing day Had borne me far from thee.

This is the curse of life: that not A nobler calmer train Of wiser thoughts and feelings blot Our passions from our brain;

But each day brings its petty dust Our soon-chok’d souls to fill, And we forget because we must, And not because we will.

I struggle towards the light; and ye, Once-long’d-for storms of love! If with the light ye cannot be, I bear that ye remove.

I struggle towards the light; but oh, While yet the night is chill, Upon Time’s barren, stormy flow, Stay with me, Marguerite, still!

__Dover Beach__
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-blanch'd land, Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago Heard it on the {AE}gean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Cece Witherspoon