You – Matthew Arnold

by

Frank X. Roberts

The story goes that the poet Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) wrote his much anthologized poem Dover Beach while he was on his honeymoon. Or at any rate the idea for the poem apparently came to him as he looked out from the couple's honeymoon suite in a hotel above the Dover cliffs across the English channel, to a light winking at him from the French coast. Despite being deep in thought Arnold (or his poetic persona) remembers he is not alone and invites his new bride to come to the window to enjoy the “sweet . . . night-air!” only to then subject the poor lady to 31 lines of poetic philosophy.

When my wife and I visited Tasmania in 1978 (by which time we had been married 15 years) we too stayed in a hotel, but above a different water channel (the Bass Strait between Tasmania and Australia) next to a stretch of sand known as Scamander Beach. Looking out from the balcony of our room, north across the strait and seeing a light gleam and disappear across the water, the idea for the following poem came to me.
 
Perhaps readers might find it useful to reacquaint themselves with Arnold’s poem before reading mine. The first stanza of my poem is of course straight (no pun intended) parody. The first two lines of the second stanza of my poem may need some explanation for those who are not familiar with Matthew Arnold’s biography.
 
In addition to being a poet and critic of note of the Victorian period, he also worked as an HMI (that is, one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of schools for the British government). Arnold died at age 66 of a heart attack brought on, it is said, by the excitement of greeting his daughter as she disembarked from a ship in Liverpool upon returning from a long stay in America. Apparently Arnold attempted to leap over a low fence at dockside to embrace his daughter, precipitating his heart attack. Sometime leaping even a low fence may not be as easy as it seems.

You - Matthew Arnold
(Scamander Beach, Tasmania, 1978)
 
Here at the bottom of the world
The sea is calm tonight.
The southern moon is unfurled
Upon the strait - far out a light
Gleams and is gone. North, beyond the curve
Which rims Scamander beach,
The world like a great raw nerve
Pulsates. Come to the window, reach
Out, Love, and feel the sweet night-air.
Listen! Hear the low swish
Of the water whispering on the sand.
Are you cold?  Here, take my hand.
Yes, the sound is sadder than we wish,
And has in it the slow cadence of despair.
 
There, old HMI, a worn out style
Parodied (easy as jumping a low fence)
With only those four letter words
Allowed into the unsupplemented OED.
The tale is now told in different measure
Than yours or Sophocles'. Better I’ll
Not claim, but different, you understand,
By a newer breed of barbarians and philistines.
Sweet tones are passe now - and poetry
Hard to read, and impossible to criticize.
You would shudder at the universe we found,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
With edges vaster than dreams;
Where we hang without certitude
Between your Culture and our anarchy,
Powerless in the grip of a genuine scientific
Humanism. And on that same dark plain,
Well trained, and fully briefed,
The armies of the night are gathering.

Frank is a semi-regular contributor to BiblioBuffet. His extensive career in teaching and librarianship began when he taught English in the U.S. From 1961 to 1963, as part of a Columbia University program called “Teachers for East Africa,” he taught English and American Literature in East Africa. There he met his wife, Dorothy. They returned to the U.S. where he simultaneously taught and finished two Masters’ degrees, in Education and in Librarianship. In 1968 they returned to England where Frank taught Library Studies, and adopted Hodge, a cat who later traveled around the world with them. In 1972, Frank was “seconded” for two years to teach at Makerere University in Uganda, East Africa, but left reluctantly after one year when the tyranny of Idi Amin became intolerable. From there it was back to England, then Australia and finally  to America in 1979, to Buffalo where Frank earned his doctorate. Later they moved to Colorado, where he was Professor of Library Studies at the University of Northern Colorado until retiring in 1997. Frank published James A. Michener: A Checklist of his Work with a Selected Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood Press) in 1995. He has written on bookmarks, specifically on medieval bookmarks, his special area of interest. A poet by avocation, he writes eclectically but traditionally. He can be reached at