lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

ARNOLD AND PRE-RAPHAELITE GROUPMan, The Buried Life, The Future, which seems to mesometimes the best allegorical poem in the language,the only allegory in verse which does not give one aheadache (as is, Dickens says, the way of allegory)but strikes home in every vivid, significant stanza; andlast and greatest, A Summer Night, the most movingand the noblest utterance of Arnold's melancholy andresignation, the resignation of a Marcus Aurelius:Plainness and clearness without shadow of stain !Clearness divine !Ye Heavens, whose pure dark regions have no signOf languor, though so calm, and though so great,Are yet untroubled and unpassionate ;Who, though so noble, share in the world's toil,And, though so task'd, keep free from dust and soil !I will not say that your mild deeps retainA tinge, it may be, of their silent painWho have long'd deeply once, and long'd in vain :But I will rather say that you remainA world above man's head, to let him seeHow boundless might his soul's horizon be,How vast, yet of what clear transparency !How it were good to sink there, and breathe free.How fair a lot to fillIs left to each man still!Of the additions made to these in later volumes—Rugby Chapel, Heine's Grave, Dover Beach — thegreatest is the last with its vivid opening description,the felicitous allusion to Sophocles, and the passior>ateclose.These irregular lyrics are an experiment, but theydo not give quite the same impression of virtuosity,of metrical experiments made for their own sake, experimentsin music and mood, as some of Tennyson'sand Browning's. They rather, like the choruses in99