Matthew Arnold (1822 – 1888) is some­times called the third great Vic­to­ri­an poet along­side Alfred, Lord Ten­nyson and Robert Brown­ing, although, unlike those two full-time mon­eyed poets, he actu­al­ly had a prop­er job too, earn­ing his liv­ing work­ing as an inspec­tor of schools for thir­ty-five years. He was the son of the cel­e­brat­ed head­mas­ter of Rug­by School, Thomas Arnold (who was a neigh­bour and good friend of William Wordsworth, unsur­pris­ing­ly a strong influ­ence on the young Matthew), and it was at Rug­by where Matthew Arnold received most of his edu­ca­tion before win­ning a schol­ar­ship to Bal­li­ol Col­lege, Oxford.

In 1849 (the year before Wordsworth’s death), Arnold pub­lished his first book of poet­ry, The Strayed Rev­eller, and fol­lowed that up in 1852 with his sec­ond vol­ume of poems, Empe­do­cles on Etna, and Oth­er Poems, coin­cid­ing with the launch of both his school-inspect­ing career and his mar­riage. Much out­put would fol­low and not just in poet­ry: Arnold wrote in prose too and was an influ­en­tial lit­er­ary, polit­i­cal and social crit­ic. Between 1867 and 1869 he wrote Cul­ture and Anar­chy, set­ting his High Vic­to­ri­an cul­tur­al agen­da, and famous for the term he pop­u­larised to denote a cer­tain sub-set of the Eng­lish pop­u­la­tion: “Philistines”, i.e. name­ly that class of per­sons hav­ing a dep­re­ca­to­ry atti­tude towards art, beau­ty, spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and intel­lect. He would have felt at home here at OGOTS Tow­ers, I feel sure!

These days, Arnold is per­haps best known for his poem Dover Beach. The poem’s speak­er (whom we may assume is Matthew Arnold him­self) begins by describ­ing a calm and qui­et sea out in the Eng­lish Chan­nel. He is stand­ing on the Dover coast and look­ing out across to France, where a small light can be seen briefly and then van­ish­es. Through­out the poem Arnold crafts visu­al and audi­to­ry imagery of the sea reced­ing and return­ing to land. At this point in time, though, the sea is not return­ing; it is reced­ing far­ther out, and we realise that Arnold is equat­ing it with the diminu­tion of reli­gious faith amongst his com­pa­tri­ots.

This was, after all, the post-Dar­win era, when reli­gious faith was being pro­found­ly chal­lenged, and Arnold was known to bemoan the creep of mate­ri­al­ism and, in his eyes, its atten­dant philis­tin­ism. For him, truth and beau­ty were in retreat, like the tide, and, apart from the fact that he has his mis­sus beside him (“Ah, love, let us be true to one anoth­er!”), there’s lit­tle light at the end of his tun­nel, and the poem remains pes­simistic to the end. It’s prob­a­bly a bless­ing that Arnold is not around today: I sus­pect he would con­sid­er his pes­simism to have been under­stat­ed!

The sea is calm tonight.
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.

Sopho­cles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, 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 furled.
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.