Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold
Page 16
Gives us a sense of the awe, 100
The vastness, the grandeur, the gloom
Of the unlit gulph of himself.
‘Ye know not yourselves — and your bards,
The clearest, the best, who have read
Most in themselves, have beheld 105
Less than they left unreveal’d.
Ye express not yourselves — can ye make
With marble, with colour, with word,
What charm’d you in others re-live?
Can thy pencil, O Artist, restore 110
The figure, the bloom of thy love,
As she was in her morning of spring?
Canst thou paint the ineffable smile
Of her eyes as they rested on thine?
Can the image of life have the glow, 115
The motion of life itself?
‘Yourselves and your fellows ye know not — and me
The Mateless, the One, will ye know?
Will ye scan me, and read me, and tell
Of the thoughts that ferment in my breast, 120
My longing, my sadness, my joy?
Will ye claim for your great ones the gift
To have render’d the gleam of my skies,
To have echoed the moan of my seas,
Utter’d the voice of my hills? 125
When your great ones depart, will ye say —
All things have suffer’d a loss —
Nature is hid in their grave?
‘Race after race, man after man,
Have dream’d that my secret was theirs, 130
Have thought that I liv’d but for them,
That they were my glory and joy. —
They are dust, they are chang’d, they are gone. —
I remain.’
The Youth of Man
WE, O Nature, depart:
Thou survivest us: this,
This, I know, is the law.
Yes, but more than this,
Thou who seest us die 5
Seest us change while we live;
Seest our dreams one by one,
Seest our errors depart:
Watchest us, Nature, throughout,
Mild and inscrutably calm. 10
Well for us that we change!
Well for us that the Power
Which in our morning prime
Saw the mistakes of our youth,
Sweet, and forgiving, and good, 15
Sees the contrition of age!
Behold, O Nature, this pair!
See them to-night where they stand,
Not with the halo of youth
Crowning their brows with its light, 20
Not with the sunshine of hope,
Not with the rapture of spring,
Which they had of old, when they stood
Years ago at my side
In this self-same garden, and said; — 25
‘We are young, and the world is ours,
For man is the king of the world.
Fools that these mystics are
Who prate of Nature! but she
Has neither beauty, nor warmth, 30
Nor life, nor emotion, nor power.
But Man has a thousand gifts,
And the generous dreamer invests
The senseless world with them all.
Nature is nothing! her charm 35
Lives in our eyes which can paint,
Lives in our hearts which can feel!’
Thou, O Nature, wert mute,
Mute as of old: days flew,
Days and years; and Time 40
With the ceaseless stroke of his wings
Brush’d off the bloom from their soul.
Clouded and dim grew their eye;
Languid their heart; for Youth
Quicken’d its pulses no more. 45
Slowly within the walls
Of an ever-narrowing world
They droop’d, they grew blind, they grew old.
Thee and their Youth in thee,
Nature, they saw no more. 50
Murmur of living!
Stir of existence!
Soul of the world!
Make, oh make yourselves felt
To the dying spirit of Youth. 55
Come, like the breath of the spring.
Leave not a human soul
To grow old in darkness and pain.
Only the living can feel you:
But leave us not while we live. 60
Here they stand to-night —
Here, where this grey balustrade
Crowns the still valley: behind
Is the castled house with its woods
Which shelter’d their childhood, the sun 65
On its ivied windows: a scent
From the grey-wall’d gardens, a breath
Of the fragrant stock and the pink,
Perfumes the evening air.
Their children play on the lawns. 70
They stand and listen: they hear
The children’s shouts, and, at times,
Faintly, the bark of a dog
From a distant farm in the hills: —
Nothing besides: in front 75
The wide, wide valley outspreads
To the dim horizon, repos’d
In the twilight, and bath’d in dew,
Corn-field and hamlet and copse
Darkening fast; but a light, 80
Far off, a glory of day,
Still plays on the city spires:
And there in the dusk by the walls,
With the grey mist marking its course
Through the silent flowery land, 85
On, to the plains, to the sea,
Floats the Imperial Stream.
Well I know what they feel.
They gaze, and the evening wind
Plays on their faces: they gaze; 90
Airs from the Eden of Youth
Awake and stir in their soul:
The Past returns; they feel
What they are, alas! what they were.
They, not Nature, are chang’d. 95
Well I know what they feel.
Hush! for tears
Begin to steal to their eyes.
Hush! for fruit
Grows from such sorrow as theirs. 100
And they remember
With piercing untold anguish
The proud boasting of their youth.
And the mists how Nature was fair.
And the mists of delusion, 105
And the scales of habit,
Fall away from their eyes.
And they see, for a moment,
Stretching out, like the Desert
In its weary, unprofitable length, 110
Their faded, ignoble lives.
While the locks are yet brown on thy head,
While the soul still looks through thine eyes,
While the heart still pours
The mantling blood to thy cheek, 115
Sink, O Youth, in thy soul!
Yearn to the greatness of Nature!
Rally the good in the depths of thyself!
Morality
WE cannot kindle when we will
The fire that in the heart resides,
The spirit bloweth and is still,
In mystery our soul abides:
But tasks in hours of insight will’d 5
Can be through hours of gloom fulfill’d.
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 ‘twere done. 10
Not till the hours of light return
All we have built do we discern.
Then, when the clouds are off the soul,
When thou dost bask in Nature’s eye,
Ask, how she view’d thy self-control, 15
Thy struggling task’d morality.
Nature, whose free, light, cheerful air,
Oft made the
e, in thy gloom, despair.
And she, whose censure thou dost dread,
Whose eye thou wert afraid to seek, 20
See, on her face a glow is spread,
A strong emotion on her cheek.
‘Ah child,’ she cries, ‘that strife divine —
Whence was it, for it is not mine?
‘There is no effort on my brow — 25
I do not strive, I do not weep.
I rush with the swift spheres, and glow
In joy, and, when I will, I sleep. —
Yet that severe, that earnest air,
I saw, I felt it once — but where? 30
‘I knew not yet the gauge of Time,
Nor wore the manacles of Space.
I felt it in some other clime —
I saw it in some other place.
— ‘Twas when the heavenly house I trod. 35
And lay upon the breast of God.’
Progress
THE MASTER stood upon the mount, and taught.
He saw a fire in his disciples’ eyes;
‘The old law,’ they said, ‘is wholly come to naught!
Behold the new world rise!’
‘Was it,’ the Lord then said, ‘with scorn ye saw 5
The old law observed by Scribes and Pharisees?
I say unto you, see ye keep that law
More faithfully than these!
‘Too hasty heads for ordering worlds, alas!
Think not that I to annul the law have will’d; 10
No jot, no tittle from the law shall pass,
Till all hath been fulfill’d.’
So Christ said eighteen hundred years ago.
And what then shall be said to those to-day
Who cry aloud to lay the old world low 15
To clear the new world’s way?
‘Religious fervours! ardour misapplied!
Hence, hence,’ they cry, ‘ye do but keep man blind!
But keep him self-immersed, preoccupied,
And lame the active mind.’ 20
Ah! from the old world let some one answer give:
‘Scorn ye this world, their tears, their inward cares?
I say unto you, see that your souls live
A deeper life than theirs.
‘Say ye: The spirit of man has found new roads, 25
And we must leave the old faiths, and walk therein? —
Leave then the Cross as ye have left carved gods,
But guard the fire within!
‘Bright, else, and fast the stream of life may roll,
And no man may the other’s hurt behold; 30
Yet each will have one anguish — his own soul
Which perishes of cold.’
Here let that voice make end! then let a strain
From a far lonelier distance, like the wind
Be heard, floating through heaven, and fill again 35
These men’s profoundest mind:
‘Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye
For ever doth accompany mankind,
Hath look’d on no religion scornfully
That man did ever find. 40
‘Which has not taught weak wills how much they can,
Which has not fall’n on the dry heart like rain,
Which has not cried to sunk, self-weary man:
Thou must be born again!
‘Children of men! not that your age excel 45
In pride of life the ages of your sires,
But that you think clear, feel deep, bear fruit well,
The Friend of man desires’
The Future
A WANDERER is man from his birth.
He was born in a ship
On the breast of the River of Time.
Brimming with wonder and joy
He spreads out his arms to the light, 5
Rivets his gaze on the banks of the stream.
As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been.
Whether he wakes
Where the snowy mountainous pass
Echoing the screams of the eagles 10
Hems in its gorges the bed
Of the new-born clear-flowing stream:
Whether he first sees light
Where the river in gleaming rings
Sluggishly winds through the plain: 15
Whether in sound of the swallowing sea: —
As is the world on the banks
So is the mind of the man.
Vainly does each as he glides
Fable and dream 20
Of the lands which the River of Time
Had left ere he woke on its breast,
Or shall reach when his eyes have been clos’d.
Only the tract where he sails
He wots of: only the thoughts, 25
Rais’d by the objects he passes, are his.
Who can see the green Earth any more
As she was by the sources of Time?
Who imagines her fields as they lay
In the sunshine, unworn by the plough? 30
Who thinks as they thought,
The tribes who then roam’d on her breast,
Her vigorous primitive sons?
What girl
Now reads in her bosom as clear 35
As Rebekah read, when she sate
At eve by the palm-shaded well?
Who guards in her breast
As deep, as pellucid a spring
Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure? 40
What girl
At the height of his vision, can deem
Of God, of the world, of the soul.
With a plainness as near,
As flashing as Moses felt, 45
When he lay in the night by his flock
On the starlit Arabian waste?
Can rise and obey
The beck of the Spirit like him?
This tract which the River of Time 50
Now flows through with us, is the Plain.
Gone is the calm of its earlier shore.
Border’d by cities and hoarse
With a thousand cries is its stream.
And we on its breast, our minds 55
Are confus’d as the cries which we hear,
Changing and shot as the sights which we see.
And we say that repose has fled
For ever the course of the River of Time.
That cities will crowd to its edge 60
In a blacker incessanter line;
That the din will be more on its banks,
Denser the trade on its stream,
Flatter the plain where it flows,
Fiercer the sun overhead. 65
That never will those on its breast
See an ennobling sight,
Drink of the feeling of quiet again.
But what was before us we know not,
And we know not what shall succeed. 70
Haply, the River of Time,
As it grows, as the towns on its marge
Fling their wavering lights
On a wider statelier stream —
May acquire, if not the calm 75
Of its early mountainous shore,
Yet a solemn peace of its own.
And the width of the waters, the hush
Of the grey expanse where he floats,
Freshening its current and spotted with foam 80
As it draws to the Ocean, may strike
Peace to the soul of the man on its breast:
As the pale Waste widens around him —
As the banks fade dimmer away —
As the stars come out, and the night-wind 85
Brings up the stream
Murmurs and scents of the infinite Sea.
POEMS, A NEW EDITION
In 1853, Arnold published Poems: A New Edition, a selection from the two earlier volumes, though excluding Empedocles on Etna and adding three new poems, including Sohrab and Rustum.
CONTENTS
Sohrab and Rustum. An Episode
Philomela
Thekla’s Answer
Sohrab and Rustum. An Episode
AND the first grey of morning fill’d the east,
And the fog rose out of the Oxus stream.
But all the Tartar camp along the stream
Was hush’d, and still the men were plunged in sleep:
Sohrab alone, he slept not: all night long 5
He had lain wakeful, tossing on his bed;
But when the grey dawn stole into his tent,
He rose, and clad himself, and girt his sword,
And took his horseman’s cloak, and left his tent,
And went abroad into the cold wet fog, 10
Through the dim camp to Peran-Wisa’s tent.
Through the black Tartar tents he pass’d, which stood
Clustering like bee-hives on the low flat strand
Of Oxus, where the summer floods o’erflow
When the sun melts the snows in high Pamere: 15
Through the black tents he pass’d, o’erflow
And to a hillock came, a little back
From the stream’s brink, the spot where first a boat,
Crossing the stream in summer, scrapes the land.
The men of former times had crown’d the top 20
With a clay fort: but that was fall’n; and now
The Tartars built there Peran-Wisa’s tent,
A dome of laths, and o’er it felts were spread.
And Sohrab came there, and went in, and stood
Upon the thick-pil’d carpets in the tent, 25
And found the old man sleeping on his bed
Of rugs and felts, and near him lay his arms.
And Peran-Wisa heard him, though the step
Was dull’d; for he slept light, an old man’s sleep;
And he rose quickly on one arm, and said: — 30
‘Who art thou? for it is not yet clear dawn.
Speak! is there news, or any night alarm?’
But Sohrab came to the bedside, and said: —
‘Thou know’st me, Peran-Wisa: it is I.
The sun is not yet risen, and the foe 35
Sleep; but I sleep not; all night long I lie
Tossing and wakeful, and I come to thee.
For so did King Afrasiab bid me seek