The Bronze Medallist

[poliphilo]

"Wandering between two worlds, one dead, one powerless to be born..."

I'd been reading an article about world politics- how the nation state is dying and the future is global- and these lines came into my head.

Apt.

I couldn't think who the author was. Shelley? Yeats? Neither as it turns out. They're by Matthew Arnold- from his Stanzas on the Grande Chartreuse.

Arnold is the third great Victorian poet. Tennyson is a supreme lyricist, Browning is the life force personified and Arnold can seem starchy and a little laboured by comparison. He's not quite as good, he takes the bronze while they compete for gold and silver. He's better perhaps in odd lines than in complete poems; Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, if I remember rightly, is a humourless exercise in late-romantic self-pity, and much too long....

But he's very quotable. "City of dreaming spires" is one of his. So is

"And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night"

That's from Dover Beach- which, whatever else one might say about him and his work, is a very great poem.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we,
Light half-believers of our casual creeds,
Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will'd,
Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,
Whose vague resolves never have been fulfill'd;
For whom each year we see
Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new;
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day--
Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?

He says it so well so often.

[poliphilo]

He was an excellent writer (in prose as well; Culture and Anarchy is still worth reading) and an admirable human being- who overcame a temperamental inclination to depression and self-pity to live a life of strenuous public service. An all-round Great Victorian.