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

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1865

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

The poem consists of 24 10-line stanzas written for the most part in iambic pentameter. A pentameter line consists of five poetic feet. An iambic foot consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. It is the most common meter (or rhythm) in English poetry. The iambic pentameter can be clearly seen in the very first line of the poem (stressed syllables are in bold): “How changed is here each spot man makes or fills!” Line 3 presents another good example of a regular iambic pentameter line: “The village street its haunted mansion lacks.”

However, Line 6 of each stanza is not in iambic pentameter. It is a shorter line consisting of just three poetic feet. It is therefore known as an iambic trimeter. Thus, Stanza 2, Line 6 is, “This winter eve is warm.”

For the sake of variety and emphasis, Arnold also employs many substitutions in which the iambic rhythm is briefly disrupted by the use of a different kind of poetic foot. Line 17, for example, contains two trochaic feet, in which the first syllable rather than the second is stressed (this stressed-then-unstressed pattern is called a trochee): “Humid the air! Leafless.” The iambic rhythm returns in the remainder of the line. Sometimes for particular emphasis of two adjacent words, Arnold employs a spondee, which is a poetic foot consisting of two stressed syllables. An example occurs in Line 15: “The Vale, the three lone weirs, the youthful Thames?” The spondee, “lone weirs,” makes that image stand out strongly against the anticipated metrical rhythm. In Line 196, a spondee is employed as the first foot in the short, trimeter line: “Still, still, those slopes, ’tis clear.”

Rhyme

Each stanza follows the same intricate rhyme scheme. Line 1 rhymes with Line 6; Line 2 rhymes with Line 4; Line 3 rhymes with Line 5; Line 7 rhymes with Line 10, and Line 8 rhymes with Line 9. This can be represented as follows: ABCBCADEED.

Most of the rhymes are perfect rhymes, in which different consonants are followed by identical vowel and consonant sounds, such as in “lacks” and “stacks” (Lines 3 and 5), “stick” and “rick” (Lines 32 and 34), and “grass” and “pass” (Lines 128 and 129).

There are a few examples of what are called “eye-rhymes,” a kind of poetic license in which words that are spelled the same at the end are used as rhymes even though they are not in fact pronounced in exactly the same way. Examples are “Farm” and “warm” (Lines 11 and 16), “flames” and “Thames” (Lines 13 and 15), and “home” and “come” (Lines 153 and 155). Many rhymes that appear as eye-rhymes today might have been pronounced in the same way at some point in the past, or even today in certain dialects.

Imagery

The predominant imagery is of nature in different seasons as the narrator observes or remembers it in the English countryside. “The tender purple spray on copse and briers!” (Line 18) is a part of the winter scene. “[W]hitening hedges, and uncrumpling fern, / And bluebells trembling by the forest ways” (Line 74-75) is an image of spring, and “gold-dusted snapdragon, / Sweet-william with his homely cottage smell” (Lines 64-65) refers to a midsummer scene. Pastoral elegies often employ the pathetic fallacy, in which nature is ascribed human feelings. This allows the poet to present a scene in which all of nature mourns the dead person. In “Thyrsis,” Arnold uses the pathetic fallacy only on a few occasions. On the whole he prefers just to describe nature in a realistic fashion. However, the pathetic fallacy is present in the cuckoo’s farewell cry that passes through “the vexed trees” (Line 58). This is also sometimes referred to as a transferred epithet. An epithet is an adjective or descriptive phrase. In this example, it is the human observer who is “vexed,” but the epithet is applied instead to the trees. Other examples of this technique that occur in the poem include “the dreaming garden trees” (Line 69), “the shy Thames shore” (Line 126), and “That lonely tree against the western sky” (Line 195).