❐ Comment on the note of melancholy in The Scholar Gipsy and Dover Beach.
Ans. :- 'Separation is Arnold's theme : man's separation from God, from nature, from other men, and from his true and inner self. It is not the joy and companionship of lovers coming together which Arnold expresses, but the failures, the partings and incapacity of human beings to understand each other. Nor do friends succeed better than lovers. Further, there is a sense that man does not control his own destiny but is controlled by some power which keeps him from a satisfying and fruitful sense of unity with himself or his world. Thus, over all Arnold's poetry is an air of melancholy, a sense of loneliness and of quit desperation which find their counterparts in the early works of T.S. Eliot and Hemingway... Arnold expresses more poignantly and more truly than either of his contemporaries the controlled despair of the modern man in an alien world. With simple and unfigurative phrasing, in poems often cast in the form of an address or of a dialogue which emphasises the complex of the subject, Arnold explores a problem or states a tentative conclusion. The very honesty of his thought is reinforced by an intense emotion - love of the country side surrounding Oxford, for example, or lonely despair - he achieves the splendid poetry of The Scholar Gipsy, Thyrsis, Dover Beach and To Marguerite.
The Scholar Gipsy is deeply elegiac in spirit. The elegy expresses 'Arnold's lifelong attachment to the countryside which he had explored in his youth with Arther Hugh Clough and other Oxford companions.' A nostalgic feeling runs underneath the description of the whole landscape. In the first half of the poem we are given brilliant sketches of the Hurst in Spring, the long ale-house in the Berkshire moor, the boat moored by the cool river-bank under Cumnor Hills, the Oxford riders crossing the ferry on a summer night, the maidens dancing round the Fyfield elm, hay-time above Godstow Bridge, the glittering river haunted by black-winged swallows, the children roaming for cresses, the skirts of Bagley Wood with the gipsy tents, the forest ground called Thessaly where the blackbird fearlessly picks his food, the wooden bridge leading to S. Hinksey and the line of festal lights in Christ-church hall. 'The whole landscape, rendered as here with a distinctly Keatsian sensuousness and charm suggests Arnold's own longing for a freshness and spontaneity not easily attainable by one who is committed to hard and uncongenial work for a living.'
The poem voices Arnold's sense of despair with modern life, its feverish and fickle activity and lack of strong determination. The people of Arnold's contemporary Waste Land are debilitated by -
... "this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts ... ...
Our modern hectic life of perpetual striving and the ups and downs of life siphon off our energies and destroy us. We have never been successful to translate our faith in action because we have never shown any consistency in our strivings. We live in fragments; we divide and dissipate our lives in the pursuit of thousand aims. We try to face our troubles in a stoic resignation but without nourishing any radiant hope in our breast. This world is contrasted with the countryside around Oxford which offers a temporary refuge from it.
As in The Scholar Gipsy so in Dover Beach Arnold discloses his melancholy preoccupation with the thought of the inevitable decline of religious faith. 'The opening lines of the poem record a series of particular items suggestive of the serenity, poise and stability which Arnold desires for himself :
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; - on the Fresh cost the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
To the poet the sound of the waves is sad. He finds his own sadness echoed in the sound of the sea waves :
Listen ! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw-back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Arnold notes with great regret that now times have changed. Once the sea of faith heaved and rolled with great energy. But now its waves are withdrawing, retreating, rolling backward i.e. religious faith which once held its powerful sway over men's minds is now crumbling away :
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
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.
'In his last paragraph, the poet again appeals to his companion. Since the loss of religious faith makes it impossible to believe that the universe is in some degree adjusted to human needs, that it is 'peopled by Gods' (Empedocles on Etna, II), he must seek in human love for these values which are undiscoverable elsewhere. Moreover, the lovers must support each other if they are to live in the modern world without disaster:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another ! for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
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 clash by night.