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"DOVER BEACH" (MATTHEW ARNOLD) & "GOD'S GRANDEUR" (GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS).
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Compares styles, world views, suffering, human condition, word choices in poems dealing with question of presence of God & religious faith.... More...
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Paper Abstract:
Compares styles, world views, suffering, human condition, word choices in poems dealing with question of presence of God & religious faith.
Paper Introduction:
Matthew Arnold, in "Dover Beach" (1848?), and Gerard Manley Hopkins, in "God's Grandeur" (1877), are both concerned with the question of the presence of God or religious faith in the world. Neither poet actually asks a question, however, as Arnold sees the "Sea of Faith" withdrawing from the world, while Hopkins enthusiastically perceives God's presence in everything around him. Both poets, however, see human failure to appreciate God as part of the problem of their own times. But where Arnold sees the only option as withdrawal from a world with neither "certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain", Hopkins regrets the blindness of human beings who have come to dissociate themselves from God, even though He is always there in the world. A comparison of the two poems demonstrates not only the difference in their views of religion but the manner in which these
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The earth is worn bare andhumanity, its feet now protected by shoes, no longer even comes in contactwith it. Because Arnold writes from a view above the world, taking in the flowof history from Sophocles to the present, his diction and rhythms are quiteimpersonal and grand. The ignorant armies, ignorant of who is friend or foe, areequally ignorant of any guiding principles. There is somethingpersonal and urgent about "God's Grandeur" that is absent from Arnold'spoem even though Arnold directly addresses another individual human being.The key to the difference is that Hopkins passionate address is directedtoward God, who is immanent in everything around us, while Arnold onlyturns to the individual in his poem in the faint hope that he will not findhimself to be so alone as he fears he is. Sophocles' recognition and understanding of this human misery hadlittle effect and now, many centuries later, that same misery is heard byArnold in the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the sea at Dover (25). The generationsthat "have trod" the earth for millennia have made their mark on its soil,which is "seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil," no longer seem tosearch for or even notice the divine presence (5-6). A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold. Both poets, however, see human failure toappreciate God as part of the problem of their own times. Like Arnold's "Sea of Faith" that formerlysurrounded the world--but has disappeared--the wings of the Holy Ghost havean overwhelming physical presence--but they embrace the world and light itwith their brightness. The morning "springs" on the earth"Because the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast andwith ah! Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom. There is, to put it simply, no guidance availablefor him. The desire to touch and to take in the world through all his senses,in order to experience the divine in the world, drives Hopkins to develophis idiosyncratic vocabulary and his unusual rhythms. A comparison of the two poems demonstrates notonly the difference in their views of religion but the manner in whichthese conceptions influence their writing. The evocation of the eternal nature of human sadness broadens thescale of the poem immediately and this broadening continues with themention of Sophocles and the ancient nature of the artist's apprehension ofhuman suffering. Hopkins' struggle to expressthe inherent presence of God in everything is a very different kind ofeffort from the grand style in which Arnold formulates his view of thehistorical ebbing of faith and the massive indifference of the world. Theimmediacy of the poet's concerns in "God's Grandeur" relates both toHopkins' perception of God's immanence (and a desire to experience itfully) and his distress at those who fail to see what he sees. In rejecting thesigns of any kind of promise in the scene that lies before them, Arnold isrejecting the Romantic lies and exaggerations that an earlier generation ofpoets thrived on. Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom. "The world is charged with the grandeurof God", and the line crackles with the electrical flow that, in Hopkins'metaphor, runs through everything (1). Even dating the poem a few years later, however, doesnot rule out a trace of his regret over Marguerite, and the barrier thatexists between France and England in the first stanza of "Dover Beach" mayrefer to that particular loss. Hamilton,who connects "Dover Beach" with the occasion of Arnold's marriage a fewyears later, views the poem as reflecting the same attitude displayed byArnold in "Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse," a poem written on hishoneymoon trip. But, "for all this, nature is never spent" and the "dearestfreshness", like water from springs lives "deep down" and persists evenwhile humanity ignores it (9). In the course of thisrelentless march forward humanity has used the earth fully and has given it"man's smudge" and "man's smell" (6-7). In the poem, of course, the speaker turnsto another and addresses her. First Hopkins saysthat "though the last lights off the black West went" the dawn comes upinevitably to take their place (11). As Trilling and Bloom note, Hopkinshad used this idea in other writings where, for example, he spoke ofeverything being "charged with God and if we know how to touch them [they]give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him"(quoted in Trilling and Bloom 682). This leaves only the speaker and his companion. But the transition seems entirely logicalsince she has been addressed in the first stanza and is, after theintervening stanzas, all the speaker has left. Humanity is insulated from this knowledge by its preoccupation withless important things--the incidental, man-made changes in the world thatare called cultural progress. The "confused alarms of struggle and flight", from which thecommitment of the two people in the poem will offer some shelter, is acondition that Arnold saw as prevalent in his times. Morning"springs" and the choice of the word "spring" deliberately evokes theannual renewal as well as the daily renewal of the world. Matthew Arnold, in "Dover Beach" (1848?), and Gerard Manley Hopkins,in "God's Grandeur" (1877), are both concerned with the question of thepresence of God or religious faith in the world. They show no interest in following His wishes andorders, they do not, in other words "reck his rod" (682). But modern human beings havedone so because they have come to live at a remove from the world aroundthem. The view extends, at first,across to France and, as the lights of the French coast graduallydisappear, the beauty of the immediate view prompts the speaker to call hiscompanion to the window where the air is sweet. Works CitedArmstrong, Isobel. They are at Dover, as, on their honeymoon,Arnold and his bride were twice at Dover, and he voices a desire that theycommit "to be true / To one another" since the world is such an empty place(29-3 ). Here Hopkins uses some of the same methods employed by Arnold in avery different cause. Trillingand Bloom suggest that Arnold's poem may not "earn the transition betweenits last two stanzas" (593). 593-94.Hamilton, Ian. "God's Grandeur." Victorian Prose and Poetry. Ed. This is the heart ofthe poem. And Hopkins, like Arnold, stresses the inevitable,repetitious nature of the events he describes. The"tremulous cadence" of line 13, for example, calls attention to itself byslowing the flow and suggesting that the regular rhythms of the sea (whichthe word helps to interrupt) are not so sure and reliable as they may seem. This despairing attitude about the desert of European culture seemsan unlikely theme for a poem written on or about his honeymoon. In the"Stanzas" he speculates that "Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age / Morefortunate, alas! On looking at theshoreline and listening to the repetitive ebb and flow, however, thespeaker launches on a series of plain words that vividly recreate therepetitive movement of the sea: draw back, fling, return, up, begin, cease,then, again, begin. Christianity's "Sea of Faith" had withdrawn and misery had emerged againas, cyclically (like the sea), it had done for ages. Insuch a situation each man is not only forced to look out for himself, sinceevery other man is his potential enemy, he is also forced to avoid hittingout at anyone, since there is no way of being certain whether he is friendor foe. Thus in Dover Beach he wrote "a deeplyfelt lament for lost belief [that] gives way to a strained, anxious pledgeof faith--or of fidelity: fidelity to what might happen next" (Hamilton144, 145). He sought in his poetry to reversethis situation. God, as the creator of the world,"broods with warm breast" over His creation-- nurturing humanity andproviding the opportunity to know Him--a possibility that struck Arnold, inhis view of the world, as terribly remote but which delights Hopkins withits probability. There is barely a word in the entire poem that is not in everyday useby the majority of the English-speaking world. In Arnold's "Dover Beach" the sense of distance--in terms of space,time, and emotion--that comes across as a description of the world, and asafe position in regard to it, is exactly the opposite of the effectcreated by Hopkins. 682. The "turbidebb and flow / Of human misery" that the regular rhythms of the seaconjured up for Sophocles over 2, years earlier were, at best, onlyinterrupted by an age of faith; and age in which the "Sea of Faith" waswrapped around the world like a bright belt, much as the seas are also "abright girdle furled" around the globe (23). Even if thehordes of people do not notice now, nature will continue to give them theopportunity to notice in the future. The movement becomes almost trance-like as it descendsto a crawl with the words "tremulous cadence slow" (13), and out of thiscontemplation of the endless movement of the sea the speaker draws "aneternal note of sadness" (14). (quotedin Hamilton 144). On marrying Frances Wightman Arnoldwas taking up his inspectorship and was finally "about to take his place inthe real world" (Hamilton 144). Hopkins alerts the reader to the fact that God is everywhere inthe world and that to ignore Him is foolish. Individualism, asexemplified by the circumstances at Epipolae, is of little use to the manin the crowd in contemporary society and the only hope is to withdraw fromthe fray. Neither poet actuallyasks a question, however, as Arnold sees the "Sea of Faith" withdrawingfrom the world, while Hopkins enthusiastically perceives God's presence ineverything around him. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. But even if human beings have grown used to the earth, and seldomthink anymore about how the divine is implicit in all the things they takeand make from the earth, there are still signs of God's immanence thatshould be plain to them. But Hopkins was far fromthe despair or near-despair that can be seen in Arnold's poem. Hopkins, Armstrong notes, was disturbed by the extent to which "inmodern culture, personal morality, he wrote in 1867, has come to seem not'the same as political morality, and the failure of insight of which thisfallacy is an instance is being made by the Empirical and Utilitarianschools to overrun the whole field of thought'" (quoted in Armstrong 421).Rationalist thinkers who attempt to describe human happiness supply onlymaterialist assessments of physical comforts and entertainments designedfor the masses. As Hopkins notes, humanity has lost touchwith the very ground which "Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod"(8). The "Sea of Faith" seemed broad enough, certainly, tocover all this suffering, but it was not enough and shrinks and draws backfrom the world. This suggests an uncertainty and this uncertainty is confirmed by theoddity that the speaker senses and that Sophocles was brought tocontemplate, i.e., that human misery ebbs and flows as regularly as thetides. Like the "desert" in which he had seen culture in another poem, hereArnold sees the world as "a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms ofstruggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night" (35-7). Ed. London: Routledge, 1996.Arnold, Matthew. This is the ultimate image of the loneliness of the individual atthe center of the fray. He saw this fidelity as a thin hope after recognizing that faith waswithdrawing from the world, that the suffering and confusion of humanitywas as old as Sophocles, and that Christianity had, at best, only served asan interlude without achieving its full promise. The immediacy of the scene-setting in the firststanza is fairly simple: "The sea is calm tonight / The tide is full, themoon lies fair / Upon the straits" (1-3). Withdrawal is the choice Arnold makes in the poem as he suggests thatthe only, rather weak, hope for escaping the emptiness is the commitmentthe two people can make to "be true / To one another" (29-3 ). And from the opening lines it is clear thatthis is a strong confirmation of the presence of God in that same worldthat Arnold saw as largely empty. Instead ofstanding alone against the indifferent universe and apart from quarrelinghumanity, Hopkins wants to engage the world and wants other to follow. To demonstrate this Hopkins provides a personalvision of the divine in nature--one with an immediacy and warmth that arestartling because they not only return the reader to the explicitly statedidea of the presence of the "grandeur of God" with which "the world ischarged", they also flesh it out quite vividly (1). Thesocially disruptive "domestic shocks of mass hardship and the Chartistmovement" when Arnold was in his twenties and the later "European shocks ofthe revolutions of 1848" contributed to Arnold's growing sense that changewas, for the moment, inevitable and stability was out of reach. Thus the poem became a"threnody on the lost myth of Christianity" (Armstrong 173). New York: Oxford UP, 1973. The sense of movement and excitementconveyed in that passage is also echoed in the poem. Thus, in a very real sense, Hopkins saw theimmanence of God in the world as disguised from people by theirpreoccupation with inessential things. The fading away of Christianfaith and the failure of human art (Sophocles and other poetry) mean thathumanity is now engaged in a vast struggle in which each man is forced tolook out only for himself. In that poem Arnold, moved to "pits of cultural despair"during his visit to the overwhelming French monastery, saw no hope in thepresent and was not at all sure about the future (Hamilton 144). New York: Basic Books, 1999.Hopkins, Gerard Manley. As he said in hisPreface of 1853, "the confusion of the present times is great [and] themultitude of voices counselling different things bewildering" (quoted inArmstrong 168). This is true despite the fact that Hopkins alsodescribes humanity in general and uses a metaphor in the second stanza thatis similar in scope to Arnold's "Sea of Faith". Theimagery of the last lines of the poem refers directly to Thucydides'account of the battle of Epipolae in which the Syracusans and theAthenians, fighting in the dark, could not see who was who and the soldiers"seeing before them the vision of a person but mistrusting theirrecognition of their friends" were thrown into a terror and confusion farbeyond the usual horror of battle (quoted in Trilling and Bloom 594). The very title "God's Grandeur" leaves no doubt what the basicmessage of the poem will be. But, asTrilling and Bloom note, if it was written earlier it may reflect thepoet's "anguish about Marguerite," the mysterious French woman from whom hehad to part (593). The world, beingcharged with God's grandeur, renews itself as a sign of hope. But where Arnoldsees the only option as withdrawal from a world with neither "certitude,nor peace, nor help for pain", Hopkins regrets the blindness of humanbeings who have come to dissociate themselves from God, even though He isalways there in the world. God's grandeur willalso "flame out, like shining from shook foil" (2) or, giving it acompletely different type of movement, His grandeur "gathers to agreatness, like the ooze of oil / Crushed" (3-4). than we" and he asks posterity to simply "leave our desertto it peace" (quoted in Hamilton 144). Trilling and Bloom speculate that "Dover Beach" may have been writtenas early as 1848 and that the "ignorant armies" could be a manifestation of"a very ambiguous attitude toward the third wave of the Europeanrevolution" (594). If "Dover Beach" was written around the time of thecouple's honeymoon it might also be expressive of a shock of personalchange that affected Arnold deeply. All that beauty "Hath really neither joy, nor love, notlight, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain" and to read hope intothat scene would be, like his Romantic predecessors, to be entirelymistaken about the true nature of the world (33-4). This is more like a description of thestruggles of those who were, in contemporary England, launched on thecompetitive path of newly arrived industrial capitalism. "Dover Beach." Victorian Prose and Poetry. But the poem may also reflect Arnold's growing sense that poetry hadlittle effect on the state of the world. Despite these various types of presence, however, people seem to payno attention to God. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. Thisdecision contrasts strongly with the position that Hopkins takes in hispoem "God's Grandeur." Hopkins, far from recommending withdrawal, issurprised and saddened by the human tendency to choose such withdrawal; atendency that has increased sharply in his own times. bright wings" (13-4). But, as Armstrong notes, Arnold's poems from the late184 s through the mid-185 s often expressed, as in "The Scholar Gipsy", theimpact of the "'repeated shocks' of change" (quoted in Armstrong 166). But where Arnold's breakingwaves conjure up sadness, empty repetition, and, most importantly, thepersistence of suffering among stubbornly unchanging humanity, the dawnthat begins each day in Hopkins' poem provides a sense of renewal. When unusual words arechosen by Arnold their placement is, therefore, of great importance. Like the decline of the Romans, during which people weresatisfied with "circuses and theaters and pleasure gardens," people inHopkins' time were also being led to believe that total happiness waspossible when the individual had access to nothing more than these shallowpleasures (Armstrong 421). He had written of the Romanticpoets that the world was no different for the expression of theirsufferings and that surely "the pangs that troubled them remain"?
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