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Matthew Arnold

Thyrsis: A Monody, to Commemorate the Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1865

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Background

Authorial Context

Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough were friends for decades. They knew each other at Rugby School and then at Oxford, where their relationship flourished and deepened. Clough was a great influence on the development of Arnold’s poetry for a decade, beginning in the early 1840s. Arnold acknowledged this in a letter to Clough in 1853, in which he wrote, “The period of my development […] coincides with that of my friendship with you” (quoted in Matthew Arnold: A Life by Park Honan, McGraw-Hill, 1981, p. 66). Often in the afternoons, the two men would walk together in the area Arnold later recalled so fondly in “Thyrsis.” Unfortunately, in 1853 there was a serious rupture in their relationship. Clough wrote a number of letters to Arnold in which he criticized him for failures in their relationship. According to Honan, Clough accused Arnold of “pride, ambition, smugness, egotism, and coldness over five years” (p. 278). Moreover, in July 1853, Clough published a hostile review of Arnold’s poetry in The North American Review. Although Arnold seemed to take it quite well, amending some of his poems in line with Clough’s comments, and even thanking him, the friendship was badly damaged. Also, Arnold seemed to depend on Clough’s support to produce his poetry, so he wrote fewer and fewer poems after this date. The two men stayed in touch, but their friendship never regained its former warmth, and perhaps this severance in part explains Arnold’s critical attitude to Clough regarding his early departure from Oxford as described in “Thyrsis.”

It was also during that year, 1853, that Arnold’s poem, “The Scholar-Gipsy” was published. This is an important poem for understanding its later companion piece, “Thyrsis.” In it, Arnold offers far more details about the Scholar Gypsy and his mission than in the later poem. The scholar is presented as being young and fresh, with a “quick, inventive brain” (Line 34), who learns the secrets of the Romani arts that enabled them “to rule as they desired / The workings of men’s brains” (Lines 45-46). Once he had learned the secret of their art, he said, he would explain it to the world, “But it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill” (Line 50). Thus, the scholar “waitest for the spark from heaven!” (Line 171). While doing so, he spends his time as a solitary, elusive figure roaming the countryside. This withdrawal into solitude is presented as being one key to self-renewal for those who are oppressed by the stresses of modern life. Arnold grants his young scholar immortality because he separated himself from the world early, when he was still mentally and emotionally fresh. He was free from fatigue and doubt and has therefore been able to maintain hope; he avoids the busy striving, in which no one knows what they are actually striving for, that dominates modern life. Arnold’s critique of “this strange disease of modern life, / With its sick hurry, its divided aims, / Its heads o’ertaxed, its palsied hearts” (Lines 203-05) is more extensive and devastating in this poem than in “Thyrsis” though it is implicit in the later poem as well. In “The Scholar Gipsy” there is no mistaking the note of despair in the lines “each year we see / Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new” (Lines 177-78) that eventually lead men to “wish the long unhappy dream would end” (Line 192).

Literary Context: Pastoral Elegy

The pastoral elegy is part of the pastoral tradition in poetry, which presents shepherds in a rustic setting. “Pastor” is the Latin word for shepherd. The pastoral elegy, which laments the death of a friend, goes back to the ancient Greek poet Theocritus, who wrote about the life of shepherds in Sicily in the third century BCE. The pastoral was developed by the ancient Roman poet Virgil in the first century BCE. In his Eclogues, Virgil presented an idealized picture of the simplicity of rural life. The characters who appear in pastoral poems may not be actual shepherds but are presented as such as part of the artificial convention of the genre. The poet may in fact be using the pastoral convention to reflect on issues in urban society. The pastoral elegy often includes the poet himself as well as the one who is mourned, and they are presented as though they were shepherds. The elegies also include descriptions of nature that employ the pathetic fallacy (the attribution of human emotions to nature and inanimate objects), in which nature shares in the grief at the loss of the friend. Often, the elegy offers a hope of immortality for the man who is mourned, or there may be other forms of consolation with which the poem ends. In English literature, one of the best-known pastoral elegies is John Milton’s “Lycidas,” which was written in 1637 and commemorates Edward King, a fellow student of Milton’s at Cambridge, who drowned in August of that year. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais” (1821) is also a pastoral elegy. It is a tribute to the English poet John Keats, who died in the spring of 1821.

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