On December 24, 1822, Matthew Arnold was born in Laleham, England. He would grow into one of the most important literary figures of the Victorian age, building an unusual reputation that rests almost equally upon his poetry and his work as a critic of literature, education, religion, and society.
Today, Arnold is most widely remembered as the author of Dover Beach, the haunting poem in which the beauty of the English Channel gradually gives way to anxiety about faith, uncertainty, conflict, and the unsettling conditions of modern life. Yet reducing Arnold to a single poem misses how broadly he influenced Victorian thought. He wrote The Scholar-Gipsy, Sohrab and Rustum, Thyrsis, Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, and Empedocles on Etna, while his prose works—including Culture and Anarchy, Essays in Criticism, and The Study of Poetry—helped shape modern ideas about what criticism should accomplish.
Arnold lived at a moment when Britain was changing at extraordinary speed. Industrialization transformed cities and work. Railways collapsed distances. Science challenged inherited explanations of the natural world. Religious certainty was becoming harder for many educated Victorians to maintain, while political reform and class conflict raised difficult questions about who should shape the future of the country.
Again and again, Arnold returned to one central problem: how can people create meaningful, thoughtful lives when the ideas and institutions that once seemed permanent are beginning to lose their authority?
That question makes him feel surprisingly modern.
🎂 Born Into an Influential Victorian Family
Matthew Arnold was born at Laleham on the River Thames, the eldest son of Thomas Arnold and Mary Penrose Arnold. His father would become one of the most famous educators in nineteenth-century Britain after being appointed headmaster of Rugby School in 1828.
Thomas Arnold transformed Rugby into one of the most influential public schools of the Victorian period. He emphasized intellectual achievement, moral seriousness, Christian responsibility, leadership, and character, and his reputation eventually extended far beyond education. Matthew therefore grew up in a household where ideas about learning, ethics, religion, history, and public duty were constantly present.
The relationship between father and son would cast a long shadow over Matthew’s life. Thomas Arnold was a formidable figure, and Matthew sometimes resisted the earnestness associated with his father’s educational philosophy. Yet he eventually entered education himself and spent decades inspecting schools, making the connection between the two men impossible to ignore.
Matthew’s early years were divided among Laleham, Rugby, and Fox How, the Arnold family’s house in the Lake District. The surrounding landscape also brought the family into contact with William Wordsworth, one of the great poets of the previous generation. Poetry, education, religion, landscape, and public life were therefore woven into Arnold’s world from childhood.
🎓 Rugby, Oxford and a Young Poet
Arnold attended Winchester College briefly before moving to Rugby School, where he studied under his father. He showed considerable literary ability and won prizes for his writing before earning a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford.
At Oxford, Arnold developed interests that would remain with him throughout his life. He read widely in Greek and Latin literature, European writing, philosophy, history, and contemporary poetry. He also cultivated a somewhat more fashionable and cosmopolitan personality than might have been expected from the son of Rugby’s famously serious headmaster.
One of Arnold’s closest Oxford friendships was with the poet Arthur Hugh Clough. The two men exchanged letters for years and shared many of the intellectual anxieties confronting their generation, particularly questions involving faith, social responsibility, personal freedom, and the individual’s relationship with the rapidly changing modern world.
In 1843, Arnold won Oxford’s Newdigate Prize for his poem Cromwell. He later became a fellow of Oriel College, strengthening his connection to the university that would eventually make him one of its most influential professors.
Yet Arnold did not immediately become a professional academic or poet. Like many Victorian writers, he built a working life that existed alongside his literary one.
🏛️ From Lord Lansdowne to the Schools of England
After briefly teaching at Rugby, Arnold became private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, an influential Whig politician. The position brought him into direct contact with government and political life during a period of unrest and reform throughout Europe.
In 1851, Arnold was appointed an inspector of schools, a position he would hold for roughly 35 years.
The job was demanding. Arnold traveled extensively around England, visiting schools, examining their standards, meeting teachers, preparing reports, and considering how educational systems in Britain compared with those elsewhere in Europe. Rail travel became a regular part of his life, and much of his literary work had to be completed around the practical responsibilities of inspection.
At first glance, inspecting schools might seem unrelated to poetry. In reality, Arnold’s educational work deeply influenced his later thinking. He became increasingly concerned with the question of how societies cultivate intelligent, humane, well-rounded citizens. Education, in his view, should do more than prepare people for jobs or examinations. It should help develop judgment, curiosity, sensitivity, and the ability to encounter ideas beyond one’s own immediate experience.
That conviction would eventually become central to Culture and Anarchy.
❤️ Marriage and Family
The same year he became a school inspector, Arnold married Frances Lucy Wightman, usually known as Fanny. Her father, Sir William Wightman, was a judge, and the marriage gave Arnold the domestic stability he had wanted before beginning family life.
Matthew and Fanny had six children, although their family experienced painful losses. Several of their sons died young, adding personal grief to a life already marked by the earlier death of Arnold’s father and, later, the loss of close friends.
The contrast between Arnold’s public reputation and private experience is important. The critic is sometimes remembered as detached, urbane, and intellectually controlled, but his poetry repeatedly returns to loneliness, separation, grief, uncertainty, and the fragile nature of human connection.
That emotional dimension is one reason his poems often feel very different from his prose criticism.
✍️ The Anonymous Young Poet
Arnold’s first collection, The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, appeared in 1849 under the name “A.”
A second collection, Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems, followed in 1852, again published anonymously.
These early books attracted limited attention, and Arnold eventually withdrew some material from circulation. Yet they contained themes that would define his poetry: isolation, divided loyalties, the search for meaning, the difficulty of action, and the uneasy position of people caught between inherited traditions and modern uncertainty.
Arnold was highly self-critical. He did not believe that personal feeling alone was enough to create great poetry, and he worried that some of his work lacked the qualities he admired in classical literature.
That perfectionism partly explains why his poetic output remained relatively modest.
He wrote considerably less verse than contemporaries such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson or Robert Browning. But several of the poems he did produce became enduring landmarks of Victorian literature.
🏇 Sohrab and Rustum
One of Arnold’s major narrative poems, Sohrab and Rustum, appeared in his 1853 collection Poems: A New Edition.
Drawing upon the Persian epic tradition associated with Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, the poem tells the tragic story of the warrior Rustum and his son Sohrab. Father and son encounter one another in battle without initially understanding their relationship, and Rustum mortally wounds Sohrab before realizing who he is.
The story allowed Arnold to explore several themes that fascinated him: fate, family, recognition, heroism, loss, and the limitations of human knowledge.
Its classical restraint also suited Arnold’s developing theory of poetry. He admired ancient writers because he believed they possessed a clarity, seriousness, and command of form that modern writers should study rather than simply abandoning inherited traditions.
The poem demonstrates another side of Arnold from the intimate melancholy associated with Dover Beach. He could work on a large narrative scale, using distant history and legend to approach emotions that were universal.
🌾 The Scholar-Gipsy and the “Disease of Modern Life”
Another poem from the 1853 collection would become one of Arnold’s most distinctive works.
The Scholar-Gipsy is based upon a seventeenth-century story about an Oxford student who abandons university life and joins a group of wandering Romani people in order to learn their knowledge.
Arnold transforms that old story into a meditation on modern existence.
The scholar-gipsy fascinates him because he possesses something modern people appear to have lost: a single purpose. He is not constantly divided between competing ambitions, anxieties, obligations, distractions, and doubts.
Arnold contrasts that imagined unity with what he calls the “strange disease of modern life,” a condition characterized by hurry, divided aims, exhaustion, and the inability to commit completely to one direction.
That diagnosis feels remarkably recognizable today.
Arnold was writing decades before automobiles, airplanes, television, smartphones, email, or social media. Yet he already sensed that modernity could produce a peculiar form of psychological fragmentation. Greater activity did not necessarily create greater meaning. More choices could lead to less certainty.
The Scholar-Gipsy therefore became much more than a pastoral poem about Oxfordshire.
It became one of Victorian literature’s most memorable examinations of modern restlessness.
🎓 Professor of Poetry at Oxford
In 1857, Arnold was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.
The appointment marked an important transition in his career. Although he continued writing poetry, criticism increasingly became the center of his intellectual life.
Arnold also broke with university tradition by delivering his professorial lectures in English rather than Latin. The decision helped make literary criticism accessible to a broader audience and reflected his belief that serious discussions of literature should participate directly in contemporary cultural life.
His Oxford lectures addressed classical literature, translation, modern writing, and the role literature could play in society.
Arnold did not view criticism simply as the act of deciding whether a book was good or bad.
At its best, criticism helped create an intellectual atmosphere in which people could encounter ideas honestly, compare different traditions, and move beyond provincial assumptions.
That ambition would shape almost everything he subsequently wrote.
🌊 Dover Beach
No poem is more closely associated with Matthew Arnold than Dover Beach.
The poem was published in New Poems in 1867, although manuscript evidence indicates that Arnold had begun drafting it much earlier. The British Library preserves an early manuscript draft dating from around 1849–1850.
The poem begins with a beautiful nighttime scene overlooking the English Channel. The sea appears calm, the moon illuminates the water, and the distant French coast can be seen across the strait.
Then the mood begins to change.
Arnold listens to the sound of waves pulling pebbles backward along the shore. The repeated movement becomes an expression of sadness, and the peaceful landscape opens into a meditation on suffering, history, religion, and uncertainty.
The sea is no longer merely scenery.
It becomes an image of belief itself.
🌒 The Retreating “Sea of Faith”
The central image of Dover Beach is Arnold’s “Sea of Faith.”
He imagines religious belief as something that once surrounded the world like a full sea. Now, however, he hears that sea withdrawing.
This image captured one of the great intellectual crises of Victorian Britain.
Scientific discoveries, historical scholarship, biblical criticism, industrialization, and rapidly changing social conditions were challenging inherited religious certainties. For many Victorians, faith did not simply disappear overnight. Instead, certainty slowly became harder to sustain.
Arnold understood that emotional experience.
The retreating sea does not lead him to confident atheism or triumphant skepticism. Instead, it leaves a sense of absence.
Something that once gave coherence to human existence appears to be fading, and nothing equally powerful has yet taken its place.
That feeling—living between an older system of meaning and a future that has not yet become clear—appears throughout Arnold’s writing.
❤️ Love in an Uncertain World
The ending of Dover Beach turns toward human love.
If the world cannot provide certainty, Arnold suggests, two people might at least attempt to remain true to one another.
But even this moment of intimacy does not erase the darkness surrounding them.
The beautiful world before the speaker seems to promise joy, light, peace, and certainty, yet beneath that appearance Arnold perceives confusion and conflict.
The final image famously evokes armies struggling at night without fully understanding what is happening around them.
This combination of private tenderness and public uncertainty helps explain the poem’s endurance.
Arnold’s Victorian crisis of faith has become a much broader modern experience. Readers do not need to share his exact religious concerns to recognize the sensation of living in a world where old assumptions have collapsed and no new consensus has replaced them.
🕯️ Thyrsis and the Loss of Arthur Hugh Clough
Arnold’s poetry also became a place for grief.
His close friend Arthur Hugh Clough died in 1861 at the age of 42. Several years later, Arnold memorialized him in Thyrsis, one of the great pastoral elegies of Victorian literature.
The poem returns imaginatively to the Oxford countryside that Arnold and Clough had known when they were young.
But the landscape has changed.
Trees have disappeared.
Time has passed.
The companions who once walked there are no longer together.
The physical landscape becomes inseparable from memory, allowing Arnold to explore how places retain traces of people even after those people are gone.
Thyrsis is therefore not simply a memorial to Clough. It is also a poem about aging and the recognition that the world of youth cannot be recovered.
Arnold’s melancholy is particularly effective because he rarely surrenders completely to emotion. The restraint gives the grief additional weight.
🏛️ Arnold the Literary Critic
As Arnold moved further into prose, he became one of the most influential literary critics of the nineteenth century.
His Essays in Criticism, first published in 1865, argued for the importance of intellectual standards that could transcend immediate political, religious, or national loyalties.
Arnold believed critics should attempt to see objects as clearly as possible rather than judging everything according to personal preference or ideological allegiance.
His ideal of critical “disinterestedness” has sometimes been misunderstood as indifference.
Arnold did not mean that critics should care about nothing.
He meant that they should resist bending literature and ideas toward predetermined conclusions. Criticism should create space for honest inquiry.
That ideal had enormous influence on later literary criticism, even among critics who rejected many of Arnold’s specific judgments.
📚 “The Best That Has Been Thought and Said”
Arnold’s definition of culture became especially influential.
He argued that culture involves becoming acquainted with “the best that has been thought and said” and using that encounter to develop a more complete understanding of human possibility.
The phrase can sound elitist when removed from its context, and Arnold certainly possessed assumptions about cultural hierarchy characteristic of his era.
Yet the larger argument was not simply that everyone should memorize a list of famous books.
Arnold believed people become intellectually limited when they know only their own immediate social group, political faction, religious tradition, or national perspective.
Culture should expand the mind.
Encountering great writing, ideas, history, art, philosophy, and ways of living different from one’s own could challenge complacency and make more thoughtful judgment possible.
For Arnold, culture was a continuing process of self-examination.
🏭 Culture and Anarchy
Arnold developed these ideas most famously in Culture and Anarchy, published in book form in 1869.
The work is partly literary criticism, partly social criticism, partly political commentary, and partly a Victorian argument about what makes a healthy society.
Arnold looked at industrial Britain and saw enormous energy but insufficient direction.
Economic growth alone did not guarantee civilization.
Political freedom alone did not guarantee wisdom.
Religious conviction alone did not guarantee tolerance.
Education alone did not necessarily guarantee intellectual openness.
What society needed, he argued, was culture in the deepest sense: a continual attempt to develop all sides of human nature and to pursue what he called “sweetness and light.”
The phrase represented a combination of beauty and intelligence, aesthetic sensitivity and rational thought.
Arnold wanted both.
A society dominated by material success but lacking imagination seemed impoverished to him. So did a society full of beautiful ideas but incapable of sound judgment.
🎩 Arnold’s “Philistines”
One of Arnold’s most famous—and controversial—contributions to cultural vocabulary was his use of the word “Philistine.”
He did not invent the term as an insult for an uncultured person, but Culture and Anarchy helped popularize that meaning.
Arnold used it particularly in discussing the English middle class, which he believed possessed admirable energy, discipline, and practical ability but could become too satisfied with material prosperity and conventional opinion.
His satire extended beyond the middle class.
He criticized the aristocracy.
He criticized working-class behavior.
He criticized religious organizations.
He criticized political factions.
In fact, one reason Arnold could irritate almost everyone was that he regarded every social group as capable of becoming narrow, self-satisfied, and resistant to ideas outside its own worldview.
Culture, in his conception, was the antidote to that narrowness.
🏫 Education as a National Responsibility
Arnold’s decades as a school inspector gave him an unusually broad perspective on education.
He traveled throughout England and also studied educational systems on the European continent, particularly those of France and Germany.
Arnold became convinced that England needed a more coherent national approach to education.
His educational writings examined teacher preparation, secondary schools, universities, curriculum, state involvement, and the differences between British and European institutions.
Although some of his specific recommendations belong firmly to the nineteenth century, his larger questions remain remarkably familiar.
What should schools teach?
Should education primarily prepare students for employment, or should it also cultivate informed citizens?
How much responsibility should governments assume for educational quality?
Should students encounter ideas outside their own social backgrounds?
How do nations balance practical skills with literature, history, art, philosophy, and science?
Arnold spent decades confronting versions of these debates.
📖 Poetry as a “Criticism of Life”
Arnold eventually described poetry as a “criticism of life.”
The phrase did not mean that poems should behave like newspaper reviews of existence.
He believed great poetry could help people understand human experience through language shaped by truth and beauty. As traditional religious authority weakened, Arnold increasingly imagined literature—especially poetry—as capable of carrying some of the moral and emotional weight that religion had long carried.
This idea became central to his late essay The Study of Poetry.
Arnold believed readers should develop the ability to recognize genuinely great literature rather than accepting whatever happened to be fashionable or nationally celebrated.
His methods and judgments have been debated ever since, but the fundamental issue remains relevant.
How do we decide which works deserve to last?
Popularity alone is not enough.
Reputation alone is not enough.
Tradition alone is not enough.
Arnold wanted readers to compare, evaluate, and continually refine their standards.
🇬🇷 Homer, Sophocles and the Classical Ideal
Classical Greek literature remained one of Arnold’s most important standards of artistic achievement.
His lectures On Translating Homer explored the extraordinary difficulties involved in carrying Homer’s poetry into English.
Arnold admired qualities he associated with Homeric style, including rapidity, simplicity, directness, and nobility. He also admired Sophocles, whose tragedies seemed to achieve the emotional and formal balance Arnold often found missing from modern literature.
This classical ideal helps explain Arnold’s own dissatisfaction with some of his poetry.
He wanted literature to possess intellectual depth without becoming confused, emotional power without losing control, and beauty without escaping reality.
That is an extraordinarily demanding standard.
Arnold did not always believe he had reached it himself.
⛪ Religion Without Easy Certainty
Religion remained one of Arnold’s most persistent subjects.
He was the son of a deeply religious educator, had grown up surrounded by Christianity, and knew the Bible intimately. Yet the conventional religious controversies of Victorian Britain increasingly frustrated him.
Works such as Literature and Dogma attempted to reconsider Christianity in ways that did not depend entirely upon traditional supernatural claims.
Arnold believed biblical language possessed enormous moral and poetic power, but he also thought rigid doctrinal interpretations could prevent people from understanding what was most valuable in religion.
Unsurprisingly, these arguments satisfied neither traditional believers nor many religious skeptics.
But Arnold’s attempt is revealing.
He was rarely comfortable simply destroying old systems of belief.
He wanted to understand what valuable human needs those systems had served and whether some of that value could survive intellectual change.
The same impulse appears in Dover Beach.
The Sea of Faith may be retreating, but Arnold does not celebrate the loss.
He asks what comes afterward.
🌍 A European Outlook
Arnold frequently criticized what he saw as English provincialism.
His years traveling through France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and other parts of Europe gave him a comparative perspective that many of his countrymen lacked.
He believed Britain could learn from other educational systems, literary traditions, intellectual cultures, and social structures.
This international outlook was central to his criticism.
Arnold wanted English readers to resist assuming that English ways were automatically superior simply because they were familiar.
Great criticism required comparison.
Great culture required curiosity.
A society confident enough to learn from other societies would ultimately become stronger, he believed, than one that protected itself through self-satisfaction.
That argument also helps explain his fascination with Goethe, Homer, Sophocles, French literature, German ideas, and continental education.
🧠 A Poet of Modern Anxiety
Arnold sometimes appears on Victorian literature syllabi beside Tennyson and Browning, yet his poetry often feels psychologically closer to twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing.
He writes repeatedly about exhaustion, alienation, divided purpose, uncertainty, lost faith, loneliness, and the difficulty of maintaining a coherent identity amid rapid social change.
In Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, he memorably presents himself as wandering between an old world that has died and a new one that has not yet successfully emerged.
That condition appears repeatedly in modern history.
People experience it whenever technological, political, religious, or cultural change moves faster than society’s ability to create new forms of stability.
Arnold’s Victorian age possessed steam engines, factories, railways, industrial cities, expanding democracy, scientific discoveries, and new forms of mass communication.
Our technologies are different.
The experience of disruption is not.
That may be one reason Arnold’s melancholy continues to resonate.
🖋️ Poet or Critic?
An interesting question follows Arnold through literary history: was he more important as a poet or as a critic?
There may be no need to choose.
The poet gives emotional form to problems the critic later examines intellectually.
In the poems, Arnold experiences uncertainty.
In the essays, he tries to diagnose it.
Dover Beach feels the disappearance of certainty.
Culture and Anarchy asks what intellectual resources might help society respond.
The Scholar-Gipsy laments modern distraction.
Arnold’s educational and cultural criticism considers how people might develop more coherent minds.
The poetry and prose therefore belong to the same larger project.
Both ask what kind of life remains possible under the pressures of modernity.
🚂 A Life Spent Between Work and Literature
Arnold’s literary reputation can make it easy to forget just how much ordinary professional work he performed.
For decades, he balanced writing with school inspection, family obligations, travel, reports, lectures, and public responsibilities.
He eventually retired from his inspector’s position in 1886.
By then, his influence stretched far beyond poetry. He had become one of Victorian Britain’s most recognizable critics of education and culture, and his essays were being read on both sides of the Atlantic.
Arnold also traveled to the United States during the 1880s, delivering lectures to American audiences.
The journeys brought him into a literary culture that included writers whose assumptions about democracy and national identity could differ significantly from his own. Walt Whitman, for example, had little patience for Arnold’s cultivated critical manner.
Yet Arnold’s international lectures demonstrate how widely his reputation had spread.
🕯️ Matthew Arnold’s Death
Matthew Arnold died suddenly on April 15, 1888, while in Liverpool. He had gone there in connection with the arrival of his daughter Lucy, who was returning from the United States.
He suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 65.
Arnold was buried at All Saints Church in Laleham, returning in death to the village where he had been born more than six decades earlier.
His wife Fanny survived him.
Westminster Abbey later commemorated Arnold in Poets’ Corner. He is unusual in having two memorials within the Abbey: a bust unveiled in 1891 and a later tablet dedicated in 1989.
The memorial identifies him simply and appropriately as “Poet and Critic.”
Few descriptions could summarize his achievement more accurately.
🌊 The Enduring Power of Dover Beach
Arnold wrote many influential essays and several important poems, but Dover Beach has become the work through which most modern readers encounter him.
Its survival is understandable.
The poem begins in beauty but refuses to remain there. The sea, moonlight, distant coastline, and quiet night gradually open into one of literature’s great meditations on uncertainty.
Arnold’s specific Victorian concerns no longer need to be ours for the poem to work.
Every generation experiences moments when supposedly permanent structures begin to look unstable.
Religions change.
Political systems lose authority.
Technologies reorganize daily life.
Shared assumptions fracture.
People become unsure which institutions they can trust.
And amid all of that change, individual human beings continue searching for some dependable form of connection.
That is the emotional landscape of Dover Beach.
It is also recognizably our own.
🌟 Why Matthew Arnold Still Matters
Matthew Arnold matters because he took culture seriously without imagining that culture existed only for scholars.
Literature, education, history, philosophy, art, and criticism mattered to him because they could help people resist intellectual narrowness.
He worried about societies dominated by material success but lacking reflection.
He worried about political groups so certain of themselves that they stopped listening to other ideas.
He worried about people overwhelmed by the restless pace of modern life.
He worried about the consequences of losing inherited sources of meaning without developing adequate replacements.
Those concerns have not disappeared.
If anything, some have intensified.
Arnold’s solutions will not satisfy everyone. His conception of culture can sometimes feel paternalistic, and his social categories clearly reflect Victorian assumptions. Modern criticism has challenged many of his judgments and rightly expanded the literary canon far beyond the traditions he emphasized.
But the question underneath his work remains valuable.
How do we become less narrow versions of ourselves?
Arnold’s answer was that we read widely, examine ideas seriously, compare cultures, develop our judgment, remain open to what others have discovered, and refuse to mistake material success for the whole purpose of life.
🎂 Remembering Matthew Arnold on His Birthday
December 24 gives us an opportunity to remember a Victorian writer whose work seems unexpectedly suited to an unsettled modern world.
Matthew Arnold was the son of one of Britain’s most famous educators, an Oxford scholar, a school inspector who spent decades traveling through England, a professor who helped reshape literary criticism, and a poet whose relatively small body of verse contained some of the nineteenth century’s most memorable explorations of uncertainty.
He lived between worlds. The inherited confidence of the past was weakening, while the intellectual structures of the future remained incomplete. Instead of pretending otherwise, Arnold made that uncomfortable position the subject of his poetry.
In The Scholar-Gipsy, he saw modern people exhausted by divided aims. In his criticism, he urged readers to seek beyond the boundaries of their own assumptions. In Culture and Anarchy, he imagined culture as a means of developing fuller human beings. And in Dover Beach, he listened to the retreating Sea of Faith and asked what might still hold people together when certainty disappears.
That final question is probably why Matthew Arnold remains worth reading more than two centuries after his birth.
The Victorian world that produced him has vanished.
The search for meaning in a changing one has not.
Cadmus and Harmonia
Far, far from here,
The Adriatic breaks in a warm bay
Among the green Illyrian hills; and there
The sunshine in the happy glens is fair,
And by the sea, and in the brakes.
The grass is cool, the sea-side air
Buoyant and fresh, the mountain flowers
More virginal and sweet than ours.
And there, they say, two bright and aged snakes,
Who once were Cadmus and Harmonia,
Bask in the glens or on the warm sea-shore,
In breathless quiet, after all their ills;
Nor do they see their country, nor the place
Where the Sphinx lived among the frowning hills,
Nor the unhappy palace of their race,
Nor Thebes, nor the Ismenus, any more.
There those two live, far in the Illyrian brakes!
They had stay’d long enough to see,
In Thebes, the billow of calamity
Over their own dear children roll’d,
Curse upon curse, pang upon pang,
For years, they sitting helpless in their home,
A grey old man and woman; yet of old
The Gods had to their marriage come,
And at the banquet all the Muses sang.
Therefore they did not end their days
In sight of blood, but were rapt, far away,
To where the west-wind plays,
And murmurs of the Adriatic come
To those untrodden mountain-lawns; and there
Placed safely in changed forms, the pair
Wholly forgot their first sad life, and home,
And all that Theban woe, and stray
For ever through the glens, placid and dumb.
-Matthew Arnold
🔗 Related Articles
- Thom Gunn: Remembering the Poet of Movement, Desire & Modern Life on His Birthday
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Celebrating the Author of Frankenstein on Her Birthday
- On This Day: Walt Whitman
- Rita Dove: Celebrating the Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet on Her 74th Birthday
- Yusef Komunyakaa: A Biography of the Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet
