This is one of those poems that, like Keats's Eve of St. Agnes, is so good I can hardly stand to read it. I liked it when I was young and I like it far more now that I'm old. In addition to being great verse, it's like The Second Coming, a poem that in a relatively few lines captures something essential in its time. Which in many ways is still our time.
I mean, talk about your ignorant armies and your darkling plain....
Thank you for the reference to Anthony Hecht's poem, for a comparison. The change of tone is ripe and far from tender, yet it to goes into the night, with perfume's delight.
Great poem. Arnold was just a fantastic literary critic, and it shows in this poem. Even as he evaluates the emotion that looking through a hotel window evokes for him personally, he brings up the ancients and his they viewed the ocean, whether negatively, like Sophocles, or positively, seeing the ocean as a sort of protective ring placed around the world by the gods.
In the face of the sadness and mystery and shifting changeability of the inpenetrable world , Arnold decides that the best defense against that inconstancy is his own constancy, perhaps unlike the tragic Sophocles. It’s good stuff.
This is one of those poems that, like Keats's Eve of St. Agnes, is so good I can hardly stand to read it. I liked it when I was young and I like it far more now that I'm old. In addition to being great verse, it's like The Second Coming, a poem that in a relatively few lines captures something essential in its time. Which in many ways is still our time.
I mean, talk about your ignorant armies and your darkling plain....
Thank you for the reference to Anthony Hecht's poem, for a comparison. The change of tone is ripe and far from tender, yet it to goes into the night, with perfume's delight.
Am far to optimistic for Mathew Arnold's take.
Great poem. Arnold was just a fantastic literary critic, and it shows in this poem. Even as he evaluates the emotion that looking through a hotel window evokes for him personally, he brings up the ancients and his they viewed the ocean, whether negatively, like Sophocles, or positively, seeing the ocean as a sort of protective ring placed around the world by the gods.
In the face of the sadness and mystery and shifting changeability of the inpenetrable world , Arnold decides that the best defense against that inconstancy is his own constancy, perhaps unlike the tragic Sophocles. It’s good stuff.