routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

Victorian poetry
329
This is one of the few highly ironic commentaries on the crisis of faith of
the age. Clough is usually represented in anthologies by his shorter poems,
but he is also an innovator in longer poems. His The Bothie of Tober-na-
Vuolich (1848) is a novel in verse, recording an autobiographical
undergraduate love story. In collections of poems such as Dipsychus (1850)
he explores in depth and detail the extent of his religious uncertainties.
If one single poem brings together the major concerns of mid-Victorian
writing, it is Dover Beach (1867) by Matthew Arnold. Set in a room
overlooking the Straits of Dover, it describes love, faith, and desolation,
bringing together classical and modern allusions, to conclude with a
vision of the world more completely negative than any in the previous
two centuries. Arnold begins with a version of a world of endless sadness:
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 begin again,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in
and ends with a vision of bleak nothingness in which meaningless
wars are fought for meaningless causes. Against such a background,
human love has no purpose:
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
It is a world which has neither ‘certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain’.
This is the twentieth-century ‘wasteland’, half a century before the First
World War brought ‘no man’s land’ into the language. The vision of despair
is the antithesis of the ‘high moral lesson’ of mainstream Victorianism, but
it is a vision for which Tennyson, Dickens and others had amply prepared
the ground. The reaction to despair might be the jingoism of Kipling, or the
pessimism of Hardy and Conrad, or the positivist sense of duty of George
Eliot, but the ‘eternal note of sadness’ was now part of Victorian literature.
Arnold was no pessimist, however: ‘love, let us be true to one
another’ is the saving emotion in Dover Beach. But he was an acutely