Write a note on Arnold's melancholy
Arnold is, by universal consent, one of the most melancholy poets of England. " nothing in Arnold's verse is more interesting than its elegiac element. It is not too much to say that there is no other English poet in whom the elegiac spirit so reigns as it does in him.
He found in the elegiac the outlet of his natural melancholy of the Virgilian cry over, the mournfulness of mortal destiny. It is the natural tone of an agnostic who is not jubilant, but regretful of its beauty and regretful of its lost promise. " Browning declares that in the
" world as God has made it, all is beauty ". Arnold, however, strikes a discordant note. Amidst universal rejoicings in the Victorian age, Arnold seems to be supreme anachronism.
In poetry, in the other hand, he was out and out a weeping philosopher. Outwardly flippant, Arnold was melancholy within. His friend J. C. Shairp wrote a poem, which gives us a thumb-nail sketch of Arnold in his youth :
So full of power, yet blithe and debonair,
Rallying his friends with pleasant banter gay,
Or half - a dream chaunting with jaunty air
Great words or Goethe, each of Beranger ;
We see the banter sparkle in his prose,
But know not there the undertone which flows,
So calmly sad, through all his stately lay.
His friends and relatives, normally used to his dandy pose, were surprised to find the introspectiveness and profound melancholy of the strayed Reveller and Other Poems. Arnold presents a striking contrast between the gods and the poets.
The gods and the poets are both visionaries. But while the gods are mentally detached, the poets are emotionally involved. Poets identify themselves with men and women and share with them their trials and tribulations. And out of this suffering emerges poetry. They learn in suffering what they teach in song
These things. Ulysses,
The wise Bards also
But oh what lab our!
O prince, what pain!
A profoundly melancholy poem. Dover Beach is at once religious and sceptical, philosophical and emotional. The mood of melancholy is quite in harmony with the melancholy sound of the receding waves. " An exquisite piece of pensive music ". Dover Beach has a note of philosophical melancholy.
The sea of faith
Was once, too at the full, the round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd
But now I only heat
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar
Retreating to the breath
Of the night - wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
The world outwardly is like a beautiful dreamland, but actually it ...
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 armies clash by night.
Read More-
- Plot construction of 'She Stoops to Conquer'
- English Comedy before Goldsmith
- Sentimental Comedy: Reaction of Goldsmith against it
- Character and role of Miss Neville
- Discuss She Stoops to Conquer as a Sentimental Comedy
- Discuss Goldsmith's View of Sentimental Comedy
- Give an estimate of Goldsmith as a dramatist
- Contribution of Goldsmith as a Dramatist
