Matthew Arnold (1822 – 1888)
English poet, essayist and cultural critic.
Fate gave, what Chance shall not control,
His sad lucidity of soul.
On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.
Come, dear children, let us away;
Down and away below.
Now my brothers call from the bay;
Now the great winds shoreward blow;
Now the salt tides seaward flow;
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
Children dear, let us away.
This way, this way!
The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and wisely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.
Therefore to thee it was given
Many to save with thyself;
And, at the end of thy day,
O faithful shepherd! to come,
Bringing thy sheep in thy hand.
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;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us, to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.
Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade,
With a free, onward impulse brushing through,
By night, the silver’d branches of the glade.
A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.
We do not what we ought,
What we ought not, we do,
And lean upon the thought
That chance will bring us through.
Why faintest thou! I wander’d till I died.
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.
Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside.
For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.
I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.
How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves!
Again — thou hearest?
Eternal passion!
Eternal pain!
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.
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.
Wordsworth has gone from us — and ye,
Ah, may ye feel his voice as we!
He too upon a wintry clime
Had fallen — on this iron time
Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears.
With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day and wish’t were done.
Not till the hours of light return
All we have built do we discern.
Yet they, believe me, who await
No gifts from Chance, have conquer’d Fate.