25 pages • 50 minutes read
Matthew ArnoldThyrsis: A Monody, to Commemorate the Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1865A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“The Buried Life” by Matthew Arnold (1852)
Just as “Thyrsis” looks back on and tries to recapture a more youthful, idealistic, and truthful perspective on life, the speaker in “The Buried Life” expresses regret for how people forget who they really are. As the pressures of life build up, they lose the ability to experience the depths of their own lives and fail to express their real feelings. They hide from themselves and from others, and this creates a feeling of melancholy. Only rarely, in a moment of love between two people, something happens—deep feelings stir again, the hurly-burly of day-to-day life recedes, and a man starts to know once again “The hills where his life rose, / And the sea where it goes.”
“Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold (1867)
“Dover Beach” presents the distressing consequences of the loss of faith in the modern world. As in “Thyrsis,” some vital element of life has gone missing, but unlike in the elegy, Arnold does not present it as something that can be recaptured in this poem. Now that religious faith is on the retreat, the world itself has “neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” What is left is sadness and melancholy. The only solution is for people to love one another.
“Adonais” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1821)
Along with “Thyrsis” and Milton’s “Lycidas,” Shelley’s “Adonais” is one of the three most famous pastoral elegies in English literature. Shelley wrote it in the spring of 1821 as a tribute to the poet John Keats after he heard of Keats’s death in Rome, Italy, in February of that year. Shelley and Keats knew each other, and Shelley thought very highly of the other poet. In “Adonais,” Shelley follows the conventions of the traditional pastoral elegies by Theocritus and other ancient Greek poets more closely than Arnold does in “Thyrsis.” The poem consists of 55 Spenserian stanzas, in which each stanza consists of nine lines, eight of them in iambic pentameter and the final line in iambic hexameter (also known as an alexandrine line).
Further Literary Resources
“Matthew Arnold” by The Poetry Foundation
This is an informative and readable overview of Arnold’s life and work, including poetry and prose. The writer identifies Arnold’s “recurring themes of man’s lonely state and of a search for an inner self.”
Culture and Anarchy and Other Selected Prose by Matthew Arnold, introduction by P. J. Keating (2015)
Arnold today is known as much for his prose as his poetry, and this volume serves as an introduction to his social and literary essays. It includes Essays in Criticism and Essays in Criticism Second Series, the Preface to Poems (1853) and Culture and Anarchy. In the latter, Arnold criticized industrial society and argued for a more civilized culture, which he summed up in the phrase “sweetness and light.”
A Gift Imprisoned: A Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold by Ian Hamilton (1998)
In this biography, Hamilton focuses on Arnold as a poet and examines why he had virtually abandoned poetry by the age of 40 in favor of social and literary criticism. Hamilton discusses whether Arnold lacked belief in his own poetic talent or was drawn by a sense of duty to other work. The author also examines the biographical and literary sources of Arnold’s poetry.
Listen to Poem
American actor Vincent Price, most famous for his work in a variety of horror films but also a well-regarded stage actor and artist, lends his voice to Shelley's 1821 pastoral elegy for fellow poet John Keats.
Related Titles
By Matthew Arnold
