Wanderings in Arnold's Balder Dead

Sleipnir depicted on the Tjängvide stone, Gotland

[Image source: Wikipedia .]

  But the blind Hoder left the feasting gods

In Odin's hall, and went through Asgard streets,

And past the haven where the gods have moored

Their ships, and through the gate, beyond the wall;

Though sightless, yet his own mind led the god.

Down to the margin of the roaring sea

He came, and sadly went along the sand,

Between the waves and black o'erhanging cliffs

Where in and out the screaming seafowl fly;

Until he came to where a gully breaks

Through the cliff-wall, and a fresh stream runs down

From the high moors behind, and meets the sea.

There, in the glen, Fensaler stands, the house

Of Frea, honored mother of the gods,

And shows its lighted windows to the main.

There he went up, and passed the open doors;

And in the hall he found those women old,

The prophetesses, who by rite eterne

On Frea's hearth feed high the sacred fire

Both night and day; and by the inner wall

Upon her golden chair the mother sate,

With folded hands, revolving things to come.

(Matthew Arnold's Balder Dead I.72-93)

Complete text of Balder Dead.

Death is somewhere we live in, whether as mourned or mourner; death turns out to be a place. I've lost count of how many times I've read Balder Dead recently, but now it too has the quality of a place for me; a place of wandering, endlessly searching for something lost, whether in the plains of Hela's realm or in Asgard streets. 

Where are we here? In Norse myth, in a classical harbour, on a nineteenth-century English seashore? In all three, as seamlessly as in a dream. 

*

The Prose Edda uses the term "Æsir" to refer to Odin and the other gods. Arnold just calls them "the Gods"; he never uses the word "Æsir". Why not? 

I suppose one answer might be that Arnold's epic verse bans all feminine endings with the semi-exception of a small group of (so to speak) honorary monosyllables: Heaven, prayer, power, fire.... ("Heaven" is of course a very important word in Balder Dead.) This practice is just as in Milton's Paradise Lost or Keats' Hyperion, but Arnold goes even further, by avoiding ending lines with multisyllabic words whose endings are only stressed from a metrical perspective. For instance "His eye surveyed the dark idolatries", "Of thundering Etna, whose combustible" (Milton), "And wandering sounds, slow-breathèd melodies", "He utter'd, while his hands contemplative" (Keats) ... There's none of that in Balder Dead. Every line ends with a syllable that has a firm and definite stress, not just a metrical one. The vast majority of the line-endings are monosyllabic words; the others are mostly words with prefixes, like "forlorn" or "obtained". (About 80% of the lines have some kind of end-stop, too.) 

So you can see that, while Arnold can end a line with "gods", he couldn't end it with "Æsir". Maybe that's also why Arnold has "Lok" instead of "Loki" or "Loke" (the Percy/Mallet version). And why he uses "wail" in the sense of "wailing".

But the simpler answer is that Arnold had never heard of the Æsir. Bishop Percy translates the Icelandic word as "the Gods" and Arnold merely follows him, just as he does with the "Nornies", and with the words "grate" and "limber", both discussed later. 

*

And on the conjuring Lapps he bent his gaze,

Whom antlered reindeer pull over the snow;

And on the Finns, the gentlest of mankind,

Fair men, who live in holes under the ground; ...

(Matthew Arnold's Balder Dead (1855), I.53-56)

You could infer the conjuring Lapps from reading Mallet's/Percy's Northern Antiquities, but not the hole-dwelling Finns. From where, if anywhere, did Arnold take that idea? I wonder if it was a distant and inaccurate recollection of a passage in Scott's Minstrelsy:

That the Fins, or ancient natives of Scandinavia, were driven into the mountains, by the invasion of Odin and his Asiatics, is sufficiently probable; and there is reason to believe, that the aboriginal inhabitants understood, better than the intruders, how to manufacture the produce of their own mines. It is therefore possible, that, in process of time, the oppressed Fins may have been transformed into the supernatural duergar.

*

But fiercely Odin galloped, moved in heart;

And swift to Asgard, to the gate, he came;

And terribly the hoofs of Sleipner rang

Along the flinty floor of Asgard streets;

And the gods trembled on their golden beds

Hearing the wrathful Father coming home,—

For dread, for like a whirlwind, Odin came.

(I.258-264)

Odin's midnight return follows Hoder's suicide and precedes Nanna's death. The poet doesn't explain Odin's passion. Does he whose "eye surveys the world" already know something of these other events? Is it a father mourning a beloved son, or a chief mourning the latter days of his tribe? Having made his speech forbidding prolonged tears, does he, after a day spent apart on Lidskialf, finally vent his own emotion in this rage?

*

In the Prose Edda the funeral of Balder follows close on his death; Hermod meanwhile has set off on his mission to Hela's realm.

But Arnold delays the funeral for twelve days, i.e. until after Hermod's return. Why? As G.C. Macaulay (1896) remarked: "it is questionable whether according to that system [Norse beliefs] Balder would have been found in Hela's realm until his funeral rites had been accomplished.." Furthermore the change of sequence means that the ring Balder sends to Odin (II.274) cannot be the same one that Odin throws on the pyre (III.173). In the Prose Edda they are one and the same: the ring Draupnir. 

Arnold's change of sequence isn't unobtrusive. In fact the timing of the funeral receives a lot of attention, Odin making no less than four speeches in which he specifies, and sometimes alters, the timing.  

In the first (I.40ff) he commands it for the day after Balder's death (basically, just as in the Prose Edda). That night the gods, who have memorably feasted while Balder's body still lies where it fell (apparently trying to live up to Odin's dry-eyed command), then take up the corpse and move it to Breidablik, Balder's home. Later the ghost of Balder himself, tenderly watching his sleeping wife, assumes that his funeral could be as early as next day (I.295)

But the next morning it appears that Odin's plans have changed (perhaps Frea is his "unseen guide", as she will be for Hermod). He now says:

Go quickly, gods, bring wood to the seashore,

With all which it beseems the dead to have,

And make a funeral-pile on Balder's ship;

On the twelfth day the gods shall burn his corpse.

But, Hermod, thou take Sleipner, and ride down

To Hela's kingdom, to ask Balder back.

(II. 41-46 Like any good politician, Odin makes no acknowledgement of a change of plan.)

The deferrent gods do indeed go quickly to work. And when you have Thor as a woodsman, gathering wood shouldn't take very long (why bother with an axe if you have a hammer to knock down the trees?). They "ranged the wood in stacks by Balder's ship" (II.68), but there they leave it. It looks like it takes them all day. Despite Odin's seemingly clear instructions, no funeral-pile is made on that day.

Twelve days later, when Hermod returns, he finds that the gods have brought Balder's corpse down to the sea-shore. Odin now gives his third command (III.49-56) for the funeral, including "then build a pile / Of the heap'd wood" (III.53-54). 

A prolonged sequence of laments follow, and then comes Odin's fourth command:

  "Ye gods, there well may be too much of wail!
Bring now the gathered wood to Balder's ship;
Heap on the deck the logs, and build the pyre."
⁠   But when the gods and heroes heard, they brought
The wood to Balder's ship, and built a pile,
Full the deck's breadth, and lofty; then the corpse
Of Balder on the highest top they laid, ...

(III.157-163) 

Arnold, as part of his general Homeric colouring, often begins lines with "But", and sometimes when you wouldn't expect it. Since the gods do exactly what Odin has commanded, you might expect "And" here. Maybe the word "But" is saying: But this time (contrary to all the previous speeches) the gods actually do build the funeral pile....

It's a strange situation, this funeral, though it does not seem strange as you read it. Just as the gods have been told of a way by which they might very possibly bring Balder back to life, they put that hope to one side and sincerely immerse themselves in the long and passionate ceremony of his cremation. Evidently Arnold delayed the funeral because it was in some ways the crowning image of his poem. 

...  And the gods stood upon the beach, and gazed.

And while they gazed, the sun went lurid down

Into the smoke-wrapt sea, and night came on.

Then the wind fell, with night, and there was calm;

But through the dark they watched the burning ship

Still carried o'er the distant waters on,

Farther and farther, like an eye of fire.

And long, in the far dark, blazed Balder's pile;

But fainter, as the stars rose high, it flared;

The bodies were consumed, ash choked the pile.

And as, in a decaying winter-fire,

A charred log, falling, makes a shower of sparks,—

So with a shower of sparks the pile fell in,

Reddening the sea around; and all was dark.

(III.193-206)

Yet part of the powerful impact of the scene is the consideration, in the circumstances, that it doesn't actually achieve anything. The sense of meaninglessness, which unlocks a deeper meaning. 

This funeral scene can be accounted Odin's triumph, but the Father of the Gods does not have the most authoritative voice in Balder Dead. Though the Gods show no sign of insubordination, there's something unhealthy in the relationship of this commander to his commanded. Where should we look for a deeper authority in Balder Dead? Balder is wiser than Odin, but only by the end of the poem. Hela is wiser too, but she's also devious. The most authoritative voice is probably Frea's, for instance when she says:

Nor do I judge if it shall win or fail ;

But much must still be tried, which shall but fail.  

(I.129-130)

(Arnold was not afraid of "ten low words", a point sometimes mentioned in critical views of Balder Dead. The poem has been largely ignored, but those who do write about it show a range of opinions from curt dismissal to unbalanced fervour. I'm in the latter camp.)

*

Hermod led Sleipner from Valhalla forth,

And saddled him: before that, Sleipner brooked

No meaner hand than Odin's on his mane,

On his broad back no lesser rider bore;

Yet docile now he stood at Hermod's side,

Arching his neck, and glad to be bestrode,

Knowing the god they went to seek, how dear.

But Hermod mounted him, and sadly fared

In silence up the dark untravelled road ...

(II.71-79)

Another creative use of "But" .... I won't attempt an explanation this time. 

Hermod needs Sleipner, the best of all horses, for his first journey to Hel, in order to leap what Arnold (following Percy) calls the "grate"; most later translations call it the Hel-gate. After he has returned from this journey, normality resumes: Odin rides Sleipner (III.59). When Hermod makes his second journey to Hel, he sets off straight from Thok's iron wood, so he must be riding his own horse, but it doesn't matter, because the grate is still lifted (III.378), just as when he left Hel the first time (II.287). 

Arnold doesn't mention that Sleipner has eight legs (as portrayed above, and as stated in the Prose Edda). On the whole he dispenses with many of the freakish colours of Norse mythology. For instance his account of the launching of the funeral ship makes no mention of the giantess Hyrrokkin nor the dwarf Litr. Nor do we hear about the ring that Odin lays on the pyre, "that every ninth night there dropped from it eight gold rings of equal weight" (this detail is in Percy's translation). In Balder Dead rings are just rings, their magic properties concealed (and perhaps heightened) by the absence of detail. 

*

While on his island in the lake afar,

Made fast to the bored crag, by wile not strength

Subdued, with limber chains lives Fenris bound.

(II.214-216)

Arnold cannot have expected most of his readers to know the Prose Edda, but you can only really appreciate "limber" (flexible, pliant; Arnold adopts Percy's word) if you know the story of the binding of Fenris-wolf with the fetter Gleipnir (Gylfaginning XXXIV). 

*

Nine days he took to go, two to return,

And on the twelfth morn saw the light of heaven.

(II.293-294)

Nine days to go there, but only two to come back...that sounds a bit unlikely, doesn't it? And it isn't in the Prose Edda, which only mentions the nine days that it took Hermod to get to Hel, but says nothing about how long it took him to get back. It was Arnold himself who, fixing the funeral for the twelfth day, decided that Hermod and Sleipnir would do the return journey in such an astonishingly short time. Evidently Arnold's adaptation was not simply about eliminating the fantastic; sometimes he chose to add it himself. 

* 

"Mallet and his version of the Edda is all the poem is based on", Arnold wrote in a letter to his sister. 

One of the appendices of Paul Henri Mallet's 1756 book, as translated by Bishop Percy in 1770 and titled Northern Antiquities, is the Gylfaginning section of the Prose Edda. It is a double or even triple translation. Bishop Percy didn't know Old Norse; he was translating M. Mallet's French. But Mallet didn't know Old Norse either. He did know modern Danish, and he could puzzle out the gist of Snorri's meaning with the help of his Scandinavian friends. But he also made extensive use of Göranson's less-than-perfect translation into Latin. 

Small wonder, then, that the "Edda" read by Arnold differs quite a lot from what Snorri wrote!

Percy's version is here:

http://www.germanicmythology.com/ProseEdda/Mallet1770Edda.html

The story of Balder is the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth fables, equating to Gylfaginning chapter 49. However Arnold draws on the rest, too. For instance the names of Hel's rivers come from the first fable, the "limber" chains that bind Fenris-wolf come from the seventeenth fable. The "golden dice" that Balder says he will find in the new heaven (III.539) are also from Percy (thirty-third fable). 

Percy's translation fails to connect the ring that Odin lays on the funeral pile (Fable 28) with the ring sent to Odin by Balder (Fable 29). And therefore, nor does Arnold. In fact in the Prose Edda they are the very same ring, which is called Draupnir in Brodeur's translation (see below). Percy's translation did not include names of objects like the ring Draupnir and the fetter Gleipnir, so don't blame Arnold for not using them. 

Most significantly, Mallet (and hence Percy) disentangled Gylfaginning 49 into two separate fables (one of Balder's death and funeral, the other of Hermod's journey to hell and its outcome). Arnold could not know that the two fables were originally interleaved, nor how. In Balder Dead he recombined them, but in a slightly different way.  

If you want to read the whole of Mallet's book, it's here:

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Northern_Antiquities.html?id=DvUBAAAAYAAJ&redir_esc=y

[However, note that this is the 1847 Bohn edition, for which the new editor I.A. Blackwell translated the Prose Edda afresh. Arnold might have read this edition, but he didn't. He must have been reading one of the earlier editions (1770 or 1809), containing Bishop Percy's translation. (As was demonstrated by Mary W. Schneider, "The Source of Matthew Arnold's 'Balder Dead'", Notes and Queries 14 (1967), pp. 56-61.)]

[And here's a handy translation of the whole of the Prose Edda in Arthur G. Brodeur's 1916 translation:

https://mythopedia.com/library/prose-edda-brodeur-1916

.]

*

On Matthew Arnold's The Scholar-Gipsy:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2019/02/notes-on-scholar-gipsy.html

On Matthew Arnold's Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2021/11/strike-leftward.html

The pot of basil

 

Basil (Ocimum basilicum, Sw: Basilika), a tender plant native to India and South East Asia. Possibly Africa, too; internet sources are a bit inconsistent about that. Anyway, the bulk of other Ocimum species are African. 

I have read that wild populations of Ocimum basilicum * live in dry scrubland, which seems so unlikely that I suppose it must be true. My own pot of basil, at any rate, requires daily watering. I was supposed to be eating it but got too interested in watching the plant develop. (If you grow basil for the leaves, you should pinch out the flower heads when they start to emerge.) Basil has been cultivated as a culinary and medicinal herb for thousands of years. 

[* Not to be confused with the species whose vernacular English name is Wild Basil (Clinopodium vulgare); a plant that's native to Europe and N. America as well as N. Africa and W. Asia.]

LII

Then in a silken scarf,—sweet with the dews

        Of precious flowers pluck'd in Araby,

And divine liquids come with odorous ooze

        Through the cold serpent-pipe refreshfully,—

She wrapp'd it up; and for its tomb did choose

        A garden-pot, wherein she laid it by,

And cover'd it with mould, and o'er it set

Sweet Basil, which her tears kept ever wet.

LIII

And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,

        And she forgot the blue above the trees,

And she forgot the dells where waters run,

        And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;

She had no knowledge when the day was done,

        And the new morn she saw not: but in peace

Hung over her sweet Basil evermore,

And moisten'd it with tears unto the core.

LIV.

And so she ever fed it with thin tears,

        Whence thick, and green, and beautiful it grew,

So that it smelt more balmy than its peers

        Of Basil-tufts in Florence; for it drew

Nurture besides, and life, from human fears,

        From the fast mouldering head there shut from view:

So that the jewel, safely casketed,

Came forth, and in perfumed leafits spread.

(Isabella reburies the head of her murdered lover Lorenzo. From John Keats, Isabella, Or The Pot Of Basil).  

Complete text: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Keats;_poems_published_in_1820/Isabella

*

The unsettling tone of Keats' Boccaccio poem has been extensively discussed. I enjoyed looking through these essays:

Jack Stillinger, 'Keats and Romance', Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

Vol. 8, No. 4, Nineteenth Century (Autumn, 1968), pp. 593-605. https://www.jstor.org/stable/449467

Louise Z. Smith, 'The Material Sublime: Keats and "Isabella"', Studies in Romanticism Vol. 13, No. 4 (Fall, 1974), pp. 299-311. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25599944

Susan Wolfson, 'Keats's "Isabella" and the "Digressions" of "Romance"', Criticism Vol. 27, No. 3 (summer, 1985), pp. 247-261. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23110370

Kurt Heinzelman, 'Self-Interest and the Politics of Composition in Keats's Isabella', ELH

Vol. 55, No. 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 159-193. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2873115 

Diane Long Hoeveler, 'Decapitating Romance: Class, Fetish and Ideology in Keats's Isabella', Nineteenth-Century Literature Vol. 49, No. 3 (Dec., 1994), pp. 321-338. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2933819

Michael Lagory, 'Wormy Circumstance: Symbolism in Keats's "Isabella"', Studies in Romanticism

Vol. 34, No. 3, On Keats in 1995 (Fall, 1995), pp. 321-342. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25601124

Isabella, 1849 painting by John Everett Millais

[Image source: Wikipedia . Millais was just nineteen when he painted it. Now in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.]

These brethren having found by many signs

   What love Lorenzo for their sister had, ... (XXI)

Keats gave no further details. Millais imagined the discovery occurring at the dinner table. 

To the right, Lorenzo offers Isabella half a blood orange (unwittingly portending his own decapitation). Isabella's brothers (left) observe the intimacy of Lorenzo and Isabella. The brother at the front vents his rage by kicking the dog and pulverizing a nut in the nutcrackers. The other two seem to be meditating a more controlled but no less deadly approach. 

Lorenzo's face stands out as the only one not in profile. His gaze is haunting; even frightening, in a sickly devotional vampiric sort of way. I feel some sympathy with the brothers for wanting to shield their Isabella from it. 

Isabella and the Pot of Basil, sketch by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

[Image source: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/556194622736133978/ .]

Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1868 painting by William Holman Hunt

[Image source: Wikipedia .]

Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, 1877 painting by Joseph Severn

[Image source: https://www.meisterdrucke.uk/fine-art-prints/Joseph-Severn/302654/Isabella,-or-the-Pot-of-Basil,-1877-.html . Over half a century before he painted this, Joseph Severn had been Keats'  close friend; they probably met in 1816, and it was Severn who later accompanied the dying Keats to Italy.] 

Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1897 painting by John White Alexander

[Image source: https://www.artsalonholland.nl/john-white-alexander/isabella-and-the-pot-of-basil . John White Alexander (1856 - 1915) was born in Pennsylvania. This painting is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.]

Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1907 painting by John William Waterhouse

[Image source: https://johnwilliamwaterhouse.home.blog/2019/05/12/isabella-and-the-pot-of-basil/ .]

Isabella and the Pot of Basil, painting by George Henry Grenville Manton

[Image source: https://largesizepaintings.blogspot.com/2017/12/george-henry-grenville-manton-isabella.html . George Henry Grenville Manton (1855 - 1932) was a Hertfordshire painter. This painting is in Wycombe Museum. I haven't been able to find a date for it.]

*

Keats wrote Isabella between February and April 1818. The story came from Boccaccio's Decameron (Day 4, No 5). [Keats did not work directly from Boccaccio's Italian text, but from The Novels and Tales of the Renowned John Boccacio, 5th edn, 1684; an anonymous translation first published in 1620 and attributed to John Florio.]

Keats retold the story in ottava rima. This stanza form was actually Boccaccio's invention, but he did not use it in the Decameron, which was in prose. Keats was pretty likely to have come across it in, say, John Harington's 1591 translation of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. But it had come back into prominence the previous year, when John Hookham Frere anonymously published his satiric poem, with the complicated title The Monks and the Giants: Prospectus and Specimen of an Intended National Work, supposedly by "William and Robert Whistlecraft, of Stow-Market, in Suffolk, Harness and Collar-Makers". The title is offputting, but the poetry is not.

I think that Poets (whether Whig or Tory)

   (Whether they go to meeting or to church)

Should study to promote their country's glory

   With patriotic, diligent research;

That children yet unborn may learn the story,

   With grammars, dictionaries, canes and birch:

It stands to reason -- this was Homer's plan,

And we must do -- like him -- the best we can.

(Proem, stanza VII)

Frere's poem, commonly named Whistlecraft by scholars, caught Byron's eye, and the result was Beppo, published on 28 February 1818. 

'Tis known, at least it should be, that throughout

   All countries of the Catholic persuasion,

Some weeks before Shrove Tuesday comes about,

   The people take their fill of recreation,

And buy repentance, ere they grow devout,

   However high their rank, or low their station,

With fiddling, feasting, drinking, dancing, masquing,

And other things which may be had for asking.

(Stanza I)

Keats would likely have read one of these recent poems if not both, and he has been criticized for failing to attain their urbanely cutting wit, especially when he steers close to raillery or satire ("Great wits in Spanish, Tuscan, and Malay" (XVII)). Then, or in the preceding stanza where Keats bludgeons away at "Why were they proud?" (XVI), the comparison with Byron is damaging. 

The criticism might be unfair. Keats was evidently not attempting to write in the vein of Frere or Byron; for example, his poem has few feminine rhymes, and those of the most commonplace kind. More likely he was aiming at something like a Chaucerian flexibility, receptive to many changes of mood, and I think he achieves it. And in such passages as the digging up of Lorenzo's body he got to a place beyond Chaucer, never mind Byron. 

But he could not be urbane: he was no middle-aged diplomat or glamorous young lord. He really loathed the brothers' capitalist exploitation and he wrote from the heart, as in the lovely letter to Fanny Brawne of which an appalled Matthew Arnold pronounced: "We have the tone, or rather the entire want of tone, the abandonment of all reticence and all dignity, of the merely sensuous man, of the man who 'is passion's slave.'" (I deeply love Arnold as a poet, but his literary criticism tends to infuriate me.)

I wondered if Keats, when he wrote Isabella, would have been familiar with the actual plant "Basile" that he found in the Boccaccio story (Decameron Day 4 No 5). 

Most likely, yes. Keats was apprenticed to an apothecary between 1810 and 1815, trained as a surgeon-apothecary at Guy's Hospital, and received his apothecary license in 1816. "Sweet Basil" was a plant that was grown in apothecaries' gardens: Nicholas Culpeper (The English Physician, 1652) had evidently grown it himself, noting that "It must be sowed late, and flowers in the heart of Summer, being a very tender plant". 

As for its properties, a cautious Culpeper found his authorities contradictory.  

This is the herb which all authors are together by the ears about, and rail at one another (like lawyers). Galen and Dioscorides hold it not fit to be taken inwardly; and Chrysippus rails at it with downright Billingsgate rhetoric; Pliny, and the Arabian physicians defend it.

For my own part, I presently found that speech true:

                           Non nostrum inter nos tantas componere lites.

And away to Dr. Reason went I, who told me it was an herb of Mars, and under the Scorpion, and perhaps therefore called Basilicon; and it is no marvel if it carry a kind of virulent quality with it. Being applied to the place bitten by venomous beasts, or stung by a wasp or hornet, it speedily draws the poison to it; Every like draws his like. Mizaldus affirms, that, being laid to rot in horse-dung, it will breed venomous beasts. Hilarius, a French physician, affirms upon his own knowledge, that an acquaintance of his, by common smelling to it, had a scorpion bred in his brain. Something is the matter; this herb and rue will not grow together, no, nor near one another: and we know rue is as great an enemy to poison as any that grows.

To conclude; It expels both birth and after-birth; and as it helps the deficiency of Venus in one kind, so it spoils all her actions in another. I dare write no more of it.

(Source: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/49513/49513-h/49513-h.htm .)

This account by Culpeper suggests that Sweet Basil had yet to find a place in the English kitchen. 

Keats is curiously insistent that Lorenzo and Isabella don't reveal their feelings to each other until May has passed into June (IV). In autumn Lorenzo is dead and Isabella "By gradual decay from beauty fell" (XXXII). Their love, like Sweet Basil itself, was a tender plant. 

NB "Sweet Basil" is the variety commonly grown and used in cooking, at least in Europe and N. America. There are about sixty other varieties. 

Fesleğen

şimdi orda buzlar eriyordur

yürümek istiyordur donmuş sular

sen bir odun atıyorsundur ateşe

bir odun daha

derken kış uyanıyor

bir akarsuda.

burda neler olduğunu kestirmek zor

elinde kitap olan bir adam

terkedilmiş bir bahçeye bakıyor

savaş haberleriyle uyanıyoruz

ihanete mi uğradık dağlarda

bir halk kendini tanımaya mı çalışıyor?

seni orda sanıyordum

güneşli pencerelerden mi çıkıp geldin

ellerin hâlâ fesleğen kokuyor?

Basil

there the ice must be melting now

the frozen waters wish to walk again

you must be putting a log on the fire

and perhaps another

just then in the river

winter awakens.

it is difficult to establish what has happened here

a man with a book in his hand

staring out at an abandoned orchard

we wake to news of war.

were we betrayed in the mountains

was a people struggling to know itself?

I thought you were there

have you come from the sun filled windows

your hands still smelling of basil?

(by Salih Bolat, b. 1956 in Adana. (Translator not specified.) Poem Source.)

A question the box of earth

still asks the kitchen,

...

as in a pot of,

where the lover's head

explodes into new 

ideas, as in

chop the loss finely,

add salt and stew

and halo the old charred

grandmother stove,

...

(from Sandra M. Gilbert's "Basil" (1997). Poem Source.)

An Ode to Basil

In Grecian myth

Good fortune springs

From all Sweet Basil brings.

It grows and thrives

In pot or ground

Wherever Sun is found.

Its perfumed leaves

Will bring you cheer

Throughout its growing Year.

And freshly picked

From fragrant bunch,

It makes a great Spaghetti lunch!

(Inge Meldgaard's "An Ode to Basil" (2011). Poem Source.)

*

My posts about Keats' poems:

On "I Stood Tiptoe..."
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2022/08/notes-on-i-stood-tiptoe.html
On Endymion:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2014/12/john-keats-endymion-1817.html
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2022/11/all-tendrils-green.html
On Isabella, or The Pot of Basil:
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-pot-of-basil.html

On Lamia:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2026/01/on-john-keats-lamia.html

Strike leftward!

Mill near the Grande Chartreuse, watercolour (c. 1812-15) by J.M.W Turner

[Image source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-mill-near-the-grand-chartreuse-d08156 .]

Matthew Arnold is my favourite Victorian poet. It's silly to have favourites, and I'm mainly saying this to suggest the shallowness of my engagement with Victorian poetry.  

My favourite Victorian poet used to be Robert Browning, but that was back in the days when I was more interested in the surface feel of a poem than in having any meaningful communication with it. (I'm sure it's possible to have a conversation with Browning, but my experience is that it doesn't start up so naturally.)  Anyway, this post is a kind of conversation with one of Arnold's poems. 

Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse

(by Matthew Arnold, written 1851-1854?, first published in Fraser's Magazine, April 1855. First appeared in book form, lightly revised, in New Poems, 1867 (where it was the penultimate poem, followed by Obermann Once More). There were further revisions in the 1881 Poems by Matthew Arnold, and the 1885 Poems by Matthew Arnold. Like Poetry Foundation and PoemHunter I'm quoting the 1885 text. I've noted substantive changes, but not the numerous differences of punctuation, capitalization, etc. I've also numbered the stanzas for ease of reference; they were not numbered by the poet. 

[1867 text (noting changes from 1855). 1881 text. 1885 text.]

(1)

Through Alpine meadows soft-suffused

With rain, where thick the crocus blows,

Past the dark forges long disused,

The mule-track from Saint Laurent goes.

The bridge is cross'd, and slow we ride,

Through forest, up the mountain-side.

The stanza form is six tetrameters, rhyming ababcc -- A swifter variant of rhyme royal. The rhyme scheme ababcc is the same as in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, but the lines there are pentameters (in The Rape of Lucrece and The Lover's Complaint, Shakespeare switched to rhyme royal (ababbcc)).  Wordsworth used tetrameter ababcc in "I wandered lonely as a cloud", but that consists of only four stanzas; Arnold's poem has 35 stanzas.

As in Venus and Adonis, the initial promise is of exciting narrative with an energetic forward momentum.  

crocus: Probably Colchicum autumnale, an autumn-flowering crocus relative. The date of Arnold's visit was 7 September 1851.

Saint Laurent: Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, towards the west of the Massif de Chartreuse. 

(2)

The autumnal evening darkens round,

The wind is up, and drives the rain;

While, hark! far down, with strangled sound

Doth the Dead Guier's stream complain,

Where that wet smoke, among the woods,

Over his boiling cauldron broods.

When you ascend the small river Guiers, in Isère, it branches into the Guiers Mort and the Guiers Vif. Compare Wordsworth in the passage from the Prelude given below: "along their several beds, / Murmured the sister streams of Life and Death".

far down: The Guiers Mort is mainly set in a deep gorge.

For Susan E. Lorsch, nature here is "designified": it carries no message other than what humans themselves project onto it; in marked contrast with Wordsworth's lines on the same scene in Book 6 of The Prelude (quoted below). "This is perhaps the only poem in the Arnold canon that shows a concern with the method of landscape depiction itself as a reflector of a particular conception of nature. In 'Stanzas' Arnold seems to realize that the theme of nature's designification must have technical implications for the poetry that embodies that theme" (p. 46).... "... Arnold's unease with the process of metaphorizing nature is clear. On the one hand, Arnold seems reluctant falsely to infuse designified, unmeaning nature with meaning, that is, to metaphorize it. On the other hand, he resists relegating landscape description to the role of background, for it has such a powerful impact on modern humanity's consciousness" (p. 49).

Susan E. Lorsch, Where Nature Ends: Literary Responses to the Designification of Landscape (1983), pp. 46-49.

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Where_Nature_Ends/J0C4Hu1dw0EC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=lorsch+arnold+chartreuse+ending&pg=PA46&printsec=frontcover

(For another instance of designified nature in an Alpine context, see the extract from David Copperfield quoted below.)

(3)

Swift rush the spectral vapours white

Past limestone scars with ragged pines,

Showing—then blotting from our sight!—

Halt—through the cloud-drift something shines!

High in the valley, wet and drear,

The huts of Courrerie appear.

Swift: 1867 and later. "Fast" (1855).

Courrerie: Currière-en-Chartreuse, where there are monastic dwellings (formerly Carthusian; now a monastery (1974) and convent (1991) belonging to the offshoot contemplative order Monastic Family of Bethlehem, of the Assumption of the Virgin and of Saint Bruno, founded in 1950; the order has been recently investigated following allegations of abuse of authority dating from 2001). 

(4)

Strike leftward! cries our guide; and higher

Mounts up the stony forest-way.

At last the encircling trees retire;

Look! through the showery twilight grey

What pointed roofs are these advance?—

A palace of the Kings of France?

(5)

Approach, for what we seek is here!

Alight, and sparely sup, and wait

For rest in this outbuilding near;

Then cross the sward and reach that gate.

Knock; pass the wicket! Thou art come

To the Carthusians' world-famed home.

The poem continues to ascend higher, arriving at the Grande Chartreuse, head monastery of the Carthusian order (founded 1084 CE). In Matthew Arnold's day travellers were still admitted, as described in the poem. That's not the case now. Instead there's a museum for passing tourists, two kilometers away from the actual monastery. 

According to an informative article by Gerald Roberts ("Faith and Dejection: Arnold's "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" and Hopkins's Wreck of the Deutschland" ), Arnold and his new wife stayed overnight at the Grande Chartreuse (Sunday 7th September - Monday 8th September 1851) during their honeymoon. Their marriage had become possible because Arnold had been appointed an Inspector of Schools in April 1851: a very onerous job in its early years, involving constant travel across England. They married two months later (July), but the honeymoon was delayed until September.  

The poem largely leaves women out of it: a bit like the monastery itself. The near presence of Arnold's wife in its narrative (e.g. in the "outbuilding" of this stanza) is pretty well hidden.

Here's what Frances Lucy Arnold wrote in a letter: 

... The Grande Chartreuse I was not going to turn my back upon: as women are not admitted I was lodged in a small house not far from the monastery where I spent rather an uncomfortable time as it was bitterly cold. Matt was allowed to have supper with me, but at 1/2 past 7 he was turned out & went into the monastery where he had a cell to sleep in. He got up at 11 and went to the Chapel & heard midnight mass, which he said was very striking, the monks chaunting the service in a low monotonous tone, each holding a taper: indeed every man had one and the Chapel was lighted in that way. In the morning I went to a small chapel: also for ladies, where I heard mass, the Père Superieur of the Chartreuse officiating. The situation of the monastery is very fine & the size immense, but it looked dreadfully gloomy. The weather was bad as there was a fog the whole time we were there & it was raw cold. 

Source: James H. Broderick "Two Notes on Arnold's 'Grande Chartreuse'" (Modern Philology Vol 66 No. 2 (Nov.1968), pp. 157-162) https://www.jstor.org/stable/435837

(6)

The silent courts, where night and day

Into their stone-carved basins cold

The splashing icy fountains play—

The humid corridors behold!

Where, ghostlike in the deepening night,

Cowl'd forms brush by in gleaming white.

(7)

The chapel, where no organ's peal

Invests the stern and naked prayer—

With penitential cries they kneel

And wrestle; rising then, with bare

And white uplifted faces stand,

Passing the Host from hand to hand;

no organ's peal: Carthusian houses forbid the use of any musical instruments.

There are some difficulties with reconciling Arnold's account with real Carthusian practice, and for a while it was even supposed that Arnold made up his details and perhaps didn't know or care what actually happened at the Grande Chartreuse. Actually his wife's letter shows that he did attend services, though she was not accurate in referring to "midnight mass". The details are discussed by Charles T. Dougherty in "What Arnold Saw and Heard at La 'Grande Chartreuse'" (Victorian Poetry, vol. 18 no. 4 (Winter, 1980), pp. 393-399):

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40002846

"The more likely schedule is that Arnold got to bed around 8:00 p.m. He rose at 11:00 p.m. and, holding a candle in his hand, attended the Night Vigil and heard the monks chanting Matins and Lauds. He would be back in bed at about 2:00 a.m. He would rise again about 5:30 a.m. and go to the church for Prime of the canonical office, which would be followed by a Mass. At this Mass Arnold would have seen the passing of the pax brede and might easily have mistaken it for the passing of a Host from hand to hand. ... Arnold rendered with fidelity what he saw, or thought he saw, and heard that night at la Grande Chartreuse." (Dougherty, p. 399). 

(8)

Each takes, and then his visage wan

Is buried in his cowl once more.

The cells!—the suffering Son of Man

Upon the wall—the knee-worn floor—

And where they sleep, that wooden bed,

Which shall their coffin be, when dead!

As Dougherty points out, the monks being buried in their beds (or coffins) when they die is incorrect. But it was a widely circulated tale, and Arnold probably believed it was true.

(9)

The library, where tract and tome

Not to feed priestly pride are there,

To hymn the conquering march of Rome,

Nor yet to amuse, as ours are!

They paint of souls the inner strife,

Their drops of blood, their death in life.

(10)

The garden, overgrown—yet mild,

See, fragrant herbs are flowering there!

Strong children of the Alpine wild

Whose culture is the brethren's care;

Of human tasks their only one,

And cheerful works beneath the sun.

See, fragrant herbs: 1881 and later. "Those fragrant herbs" (1855, 1867). 

Presumably referring to the manufacture of the liqueur that sustains the order's finances. Today the liqueur is produced at a nearby distillery: around a million bottles per year. The herbal base is still prepared within the Grande Chartreuse, its secret known to just two monks.

children: the first appearance of a word whose use becomes increasingly prominent (considering that real children are entirely absent), and increasingly complex. See especially Stanzas 14 and 29ff.  

(11)

Those halls, too, destined to contain

Each its own pilgrim-host of old,

From England, Germany, or Spain—

All are before me! I behold

The House, the Brotherhood austere!

—And what am I, that I am here?

(12)

For rigorous teachers seized my youth,

And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire,

Show'd me the high, white star of Truth,

There bade me gaze, and there aspire.

Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:

What dost thou in this living tomb?

purged: 1867 and later.  "prun'd" (1855).

trimm'd: 1867 and later. "quench'd" (1855). 

high, white:1867 and later.  "pale cold" (1855).

living tomb: referring back to Stanzas 8 and 9. 

(13)

Forgive me, masters of the mind!

At whose behest I long ago

So much unlearnt, so much resign'd—

I come not here to be your foe!

I seek these anchorites, not in ruth,

To curse and to deny your truth;

Not to deny, anyway. Arnold lost his faith in his teens (I read somewhere) and he stuck to that position until his death. Religion contained morality and emotion, he said, but not facts. The poem, however, registers an inner conflict. 

(14)

Not as their friend, or child, I speak!

But as, on some far northern strand,

Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek

In pity and mournful awe might stand

Before some fallen Runic stone—

For both were faiths, and both are gone.

Not as their friend, or child, I speak: And yet, later in the poem, he does conceive himself and his generation as children reared beneath an abbey wall (Stanza 29), and he does speak for these imagined children (Stanzas 33 - 35). 

So, does the analogy work like this? The Greek in a foreign land = Arnold in the Alps; the Greek's own gods = the Protestantism/Anglicanism of Arnold’s upbringing; the fallen Runic Stone = Chartreuse, relic of a different yet equally fading faith (Catholicism) ? I think that's the general idea, but it highlights some contradictions. Chartreuse was after all not a ruin (like the "fallen Runic stone") but a functioning monastery. If it was in some sense a "living tomb" (Stanza 12) the death in question was not the death of faith but, on the contrary, the death of the world to the faithful. At the same time, you can see why this atavistic Carthusianism,  this handful of pallid and wasted forms, might affect Arnold emotionally as a mad remnant of a bygone era, the Age of Faith in a stricter sense. 

The poem here, and later, is much occupied with the paradox that people and practices that are older than us are in another sense younger; they belong to a younger age, whereas we who are young in years belong to an older age.

In a less restricted sense, both Protestantism and Catholicism were booming in 1851; in terms of church building, in terms of sheer numbers of adherents... . It's in Arnold's own post-religious mind that Protestantism and Catholicism are dying faiths. 

(And another point occurs to me, though it's not exactly a contradiction: why does Arnold's analogy seem to be anxiously justifying his visit to fellow Protestants, quite as much as to the "masters of the mind" -- secular humanists presumably? )

(15)

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,

The other powerless to be born,

With nowhere yet to rest my head,

Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.

Their faith, my tears, the world deride—

I come to shed them at their side.

(16)

Oh, hide me in your gloom profound,

Ye solemn seats of holy pain!

Take me, cowl'd forms, and fence me round,

Till I possess my soul again;

Till free my thoughts before me roll,

Not chafed by hourly false control!

Take me, cowl'd forms, and fence me round,: 1867 and later. "Invest me, steep me, fold me round," (1855).

(17)

For the world cries your faith is now

But a dead time's exploded dream;

My melancholy, sciolists say,

Is a pass'd mode, an outworn theme—

As if the world had ever had

A faith, or sciolists been sad!

sciolists: pretentious, superficial or amateur scholars. 

(18)

Ah, if it be pass'd, take away,

At least, the restlessness, the pain;

Be man henceforth no more a prey

To these out-dated stings again!

The nobleness of grief is gone—

Ah, leave us not the fret alone!

fret: 1867 and later. "pang" (1855).

(19)

But—if you cannot give us ease—

Last of the race of them who grieve

Here leave us to die out with these

Last of the people who believe!

Silent, while years engrave the brow;

Silent—the best are silent now.

(20)

Achilles ponders in his tent,

The kings of modern thought are dumb;

Silent they are, though not content,

And wait to see the future come.

They have the grief men had of yore,

But they contend and cry no more.

Achilles: An odd inclusion in this context, the petulant Achilles sulking in his tent. I feel I'm missing something here. It's been suggested that Arnold might have been referring sympathetically to the much-criticized Lord Raglan in 1854 (See Neff, D.S. "The Times, the Crimean War, and 'Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse.' (influences of the London Times on poet Matthew Arnold)." Papers on Language & Literature, vol. 33, no. 2, spring 1997, pp. 169+).

(21)

Our fathers water'd with their tears

This sea of time whereon we sail,

Their voices were in all men's ears

Who pass'd within their puissant hail.

Still the same ocean round us raves,

But we stand mute, and watch the waves.

Our fathers: 1867 and later. "Their fathers" (1855)

Who pass'd: 1855 and later. "We pass'd" (presumably a typo) on Poetry Foundation and PoemHunter. 

But we stand mute: 1867 and later. "But they stand mute" (1855)

Our fathers, i.e. the immediately preceding generation, conceived as more openly tearful than Arnold's own. 

(22)

For what avail'd it, all the noise

And outcry of the former men?—

Say, have their sons achieved more joys,

Say, is life lighter now than then?

The sufferers died, they left their pain—

The pangs which tortured them remain.

achieved: 1855,  restored in 1881 and later. "obtain'd" (1867).

(23)

What helps it now, that Byron bore,

With haughty scorn which mock'd the smart,

Through Europe to the Ætolian shore

The pageant of his bleeding heart?

That thousands counted every groan,

And Europe made his woe her own?

The three authors that exemplify the "outcry" (Stanza 22) are united by the open expression of their anguish, and also by a basically anti-religious outlook. Their several agonies weren't the same as Arnold's, though; at least I don't recall any of them expressing any sadness about the passing of faith.

The first is Byron, wearing his suffering on his sleeve. With particular reference to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1818), the expression of a mood of world-weariness that struck a chord right across Europe. 

pageant: Arnold critically noting the element of exhibitionism in Byron.

Ætolian shore: Byron died in Missolonghi on 19 April 1824. Close to the ancient region of Aetolia, though strictly speaking it's in Acarnania.

(24)

What boots it, Shelley! that the breeze

Carried thy lovely wail away,

Musical through Italian trees

Which fringe thy soft blue Spezzian bay?

Inheritors of thy distress

Have restless hearts one throb the less?

Which fringe: 1881 and later. "That fringe" (1855, 1867). 

soft blue: 1867 and later. "dark blue" (1855). 

Spezzian bay: The bay of La Spezia, on the NW coast of Italy (half-way between Genoa and Livorno), where Shelley made his last home and where he drowned. 

(25)

Or are we easier, to have read,

O Obermann! the sad, stern page,

Which tells us how thou hidd'st thy head

From the fierce tempest of thine age

In the lone brakes of Fontainebleau,

Or chalets near the Alpine snow?

Obermann, the semi-fictional letter-writer of Senancour's Obermann, a book that meant a lot to Arnold. I wrote more about it here:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2021/09/senancour.html

I'm not sure if it's relevant to Arnold's poem, but in Obermann the subject of the Grande Chartreuse crops up in Letter XXI. 

J’étais bien différent dans ces temps où il était possible que j’aimasse. J’avais été romanesque dans mon enfance et alors encore j’imaginai une retraite selon mes goûts. J’avais faussement réuni, dans un point du Dauphiné, l’idée des formes alpestres à celles d’un climat d’oliviers, de citronniers ; mais enfin le mot de Chartreuse m’avait frappé : c’était là, près de Grenoble, que je rêvais ma demeure. Je croyais alors que des lieux heureux faisaient beaucoup pour une vie heureuse ; et que là, avec une femme aimée, je posséderais cette félicité inaltérable dont le besoin remplissait mon cœur trompé.

Mais voici une chose bien étrange, dont je ne puis rien conclure, et dont je n’affirmerai rien, sinon que le fait est tel. Je n’avais jamais rien vu, rien lu, que je sache, qui m’eût donné quelque connaissance du local de la Grande Chartreuse. Je savais uniquement que cette solitude était dans les montagnes du Dauphiné. Mon imagination composa, d’après cette notion confuse et d’après ses propres penchants, le site où devait être le monastère, et, près de lui, ma demeure. Elle approcha singulièrement de la vérité. Voyant longtemps après une gravure qui représentait ces mêmes lieux, je me dis, avant d’avoir lu : Voilà la Grande Chartreuse ; tant elle me rappela ce que j’avais imaginé. Et quand il se trouva que c’était elle effectivement, cela me fit frémir de surprise et de regret ; il me sembla que j’avais perdu une chose qui m’était comme destinée. Depuis ce projet de ma première jeunesse, je n’entends point sans une émotion pleine d’amertume ce mot Chartreuse.

Translation (mostly by Google Translate):

I was very different in those times when I could possibly have loved. I had been romantic in my childhood and now once more I imagined a retreat according to my tastes. I had falsely united, in respect of the Dauphiné, the idea of ​​alpine forms with those of a climate of olive trees, lemon trees; but in the end, the word "Chartreuse" struck me: it was there, near Grenoble, that I dreamed of making my home. I believed then that happy places did a lot for a happy life; and that there, with a beloved woman, I would possess that unalterable happiness whose need filled my deceived heart.

But here is a very strange thing, from which I cannot conclude anything, and from which I will not affirm anything, except that such is the fact. I had never seen or read anything I know of that would have given me any knowledge of the premises of the Grande Chartreuse. I only knew that this solitude was in the Dauphiné mountains. My imagination composed, according to this confused notion and according to its own inclinations, the site where the monastery was to be, and, near it, my abode. I approached the truth to a surprising degree. Seeing, a long time after, an engraving which represented this same spot, I said to myself, before having read the title: That's the Grande Chartreuse; it reminded me of what I had imagined. And when it turned out that this was indeed the case, it made me shudder with surprise and regret; it seemed to me that I had lost something that was meant to be mine. Since this project of my early youth, I have never heard the word Chartreuse without an emotion full of bitterness.

Obermann subsequently refers to his own remote alpine chalet as a "chartreuse" in Letters LXVII and LXVIII. 

And in Letter LXXXII he plans to finally visit the Grande Chartreuse.  

(26)

Ye slumber in your silent grave!—

The world, which for an idle day

Grace to your mood of sadness gave,

Long since hath flung her weeds away.

The eternal trifler breaks your spell;

But we—we learned your lore too well!

Ye... your... your... your: 1867 and later. "They", "their", "their", "their" (1855)

flung: 1867 and later. "thrown" (1855)

Ye: the plural form, so Arnold is addressing all three dead writers. Byron's vast popularity might seem rather more than the grace of an idle day (at any rate compared with Arnold's niche reading of Obermann), but Arnold's point is that, in any case, the shallow world has moved on from all of them. 

The eternal trifler: the ever-recurring figure of the mocker; mocking, in particular, what was once revered.  

(27)

Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age,

More fortunate, alas! than we,

Which without hardness will be sage,

And gay without frivolity.

Sons of the world, oh, speed those years;

But, while we wait, allow our tears!

Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age: 1881 and later. "There may, perhaps, yet dawn an age" (1855, 1867). 

speed those years: 1881 and later. "haste those years" (1855, 1867)

But, while we wait, : 1881 and later. "But, till they rise," (1855, 1867)

Perhaps one place this age may have dawned was in Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879); at least according to Sarah Barnette. Stevenson quotes "And what am I, that I am here?" (Stanza 11) as a chapter epigraph."Yet Stevenson, I think, poses Arnold’s question quite differently—not in a spirit of mournfulness or pity, but in one of buoyant expectation. Arnold’s narrator is 'forlorn' and despairing, whereas there lingers about Stevenson’s journey an atmosphere of lightheartedness and hope."

Sarah Barnette, "A 'Brave Reading' of One's Faith: Robert Louis Stevenson's Spiritual Travels" (Renovatio, 22 June 2021).

https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/a-brave-reading-of-ones-faith

(Stevenson, like Arnold, was negotiating the loss of his childhood faith.)

(28)

Allow them! We admire with awe

The exulting thunder of your race;

You give the universe your law,

You triumph over time and space!

Your pride of life, your tireless powers,

We laud them, but they are not ours.

We laud them: 1885. "They awe us" (1855). "We mark them" (1867). "We praise them" (1881). Arnold got there eventually. "We mark them" is too cold; "We praise them" seems to imply outright acclaim, and thus risks sounding sarcastic. "We laud them" has just the right balance: paying due tribute, but without real enthusiasm. 

(29)

We are like children rear'd in shade

Beneath some old-world abbey wall,

Forgotten in a forest-glade,

And secret from the eyes of all.

Deep, deep the greenwood round them waves,

Their abbey, and its close of graves!

Via an adroit "like", Arnold's poem slips away into an analogical scene, a sunny greenwood scene with an old abbey and a stream, and remains there. The new scene differs markedly from the Grande Chartreuse locus in various ways, e.g in being sunny, and notably in being purely imaginary. Comparable to the way Arnold ends "The Scholar-Gipsy", with its extended analogy of the "Tyrian trader". 

Yet this analogical scene also glimmeringly resembles the Grande Chartreuse: e.g. its abbey shadowing the monastery, its stream shadowing the "Dead Guiers". Moreover, the Grande Chartreuse is in fact surrounded by woods, though not closely (the "encircling trees" of Stanza 4). And the "passing troops" here strangely recall those who came to expel the Carthusian monks in 1790, as recounted by Wordsworth (see below).

Dougherty (see note on Stanza 7) describes this new scene as "distant recollections of Rugby Chapel and St. Mary's" (p. 394). Doubtless those personal memories play a part, but surely the new scene is not a real place. The physical location of the first half of the poem is transmuted into a psychological dreamscape, with its characteristic blend of surface illogic and deeper consonance. 

(30)

But, where the road runs near the stream,

Oft through the trees they catch a glance

Of passing troops in the sun's beam—

Pennon, and plume, and flashing lance!

Forth to the world those soldiers fare,

To life, to cities, and to war!

Forth to the world those soldiers fare,: 1867 and later. "Forth to the mighty world they fare" (1855).

This imaginary scene has a timeless romantic quasi-medieval character: these plumes and pennons and lances could indeed be the accoutrements of modern soldiers even in 1851 (it was the First World War that really ended the use of lances); but the atmosphere is more like the romanticized history of a Scott poem (e.g. Lay of the Last Minstrel, Harold the Dauntless...)

(31)

And through the wood, another way,

Faint bugle-notes from far are borne,

Where hunters gather, staghounds bay,

Round some fair forest-lodge at morn.

Gay dames are there, in sylvan green;

Laughter and cries—those notes between!

wood: 1881 and later. "woods" (1855, 1867)

fair forest-lodge: 1885. "old forest-lodge" (1855, 1867, 1881). 

(32)

The banners flashing through the trees

Make their blood dance and chain their eyes;

That bugle-music on the breeze

Arrests them with a charm'd surprise.

Banner by turns and bugle woo:

Ye shy recluses, follow too!

their ... their ... them: "They" are the children of Stanza 29. (And not the immediately precedent "gay dames", who could hardly be surprised by bugle-music from their own hunting party.)

(33)

O children, what do ye reply?—

"Action and pleasure, will ye roam

Through these secluded dells to cry

And call us?—but too late ye come!

Too late for us your call ye blow,

Whose bent was taken long ago.

O children: i.e. the children of Stanza 29. 

Perhaps it's all part of the dream illogic, but it's odd that they are presented as children, yet the argument they deploy is from the settled habit of age ("too late ye come" ... "long ago" ...): You can't teach an old dog new tricks, so to speak. These "shy recluses", these hauntingly superannuated, inactive "children" (representing the thirty-ish Matthew Arnold among others) are a case of arrested development: a rather characteristic Victorian image. The truly young people in the poem are the "sons of the world" (Stanza 27); those who accept the present for what it is and who actively engage in its works and pleasures, and thus develop into adulthood: represented here as the enthusiastic soldiers (Stanza 30) and the gay dames in the hunting party (Stanza 31). 

(34)

"Long since we pace this shadow'd nave;

We watch those yellow tapers shine,

Emblems of hope over the grave,

In the high altar's depth divine;

The organ carries to our ear

Its accents of another sphere.

Emblems of hope over the grave,: 1867 and later. "Emblems of light above the grave" (1855)

organ: another marked difference with the earlier locus. At the Grande Chartreuse there is no organ (see Stanza 7).

The poem treads a fine line along the very edge of faith, or superstition. The children watch the yellow tapers, "emblems of hope over the grave"; it doesn't mean they share the hope itself, but it does suggest that they experience an obscure second-hand comfort from contemplating the emblem of hope set by others. Likewise their response to the organ music is about its evocation of the "accents of another sphere". How can their deep involvement in this music be reconciled with a firm belief that, all the same, the other sphere has no existence? 

It's a paradox that continues to puzzle just as much in 2021 as in 1851; for instance, for the many people (mainly highly educated) who are passionate about religious art and music, yet don't hold religious beliefs. Do we in fact know what we believe, especially on these biggest and most mysterious questions of existence and life and death? That would be my question, but it was not Arnold's. Since his time it has come to seem more apparent, more familiar anyway, that our idea of the self is to some degree a construct. The same may be said of the supposed body of core beliefs that defines each of us and our position. Like our inner selves, these beliefs become quite elusive as soon as we try to inspect them honestly: we find heaps of beliefs and half-beliefs, often contradicting each other, and dating from different stages in our development. Which of those beliefs prevails in a given moment depends more on the present stimulus than on a fixed hierarchy. 

(35)

"Fenced early in this cloistral round

Of reverie, of shade, of prayer,

How should we grow in other ground?

How can we flower in foreign air?

—Pass, banners, pass, and bugles, cease;

And leave our desert to its peace!"

And leave our desert to its peace!: 1867 and later. "And leave our forest to its peace" (1855).

The "forest" of 1855 straightforwardly referred back to the "forest-glade" and "greenwood" of Stanza 29. The altered ending offers a covert glance back to the Grande Chartreuse: the remote valley where it stands is known as the "le désert de chartreuse". This is "désert" in the old medieval sense of waste land (as in the Green Knight's real name, Bertilak de Hautdesert).

*

The Grande Chartreuse was both remote and yet somewhere a literary or artistic person might well go. Perhaps especially in the Romantic period, on which Arnold's poem looks back. 

Visits to the Grande Chartreuse had been stimulated by Thomas Gray's account from 1739: "one of the most romantic, and most astonishing scenes I ever beheld". In 1802 J.M.W. Turner was up there, making sketches. 

Arnold noticeably doesn't mention Wordsworth's visit to the Grande Chartreuse: he wants to make space for his own poem. But Wordsworth was one of his heroes, and the background is relevant. 

Wordsworth visited the Grande Chartreuse in 1790, shortly before revolutionary troops expelled the monks. (They returned in 1838.) Dorothy wrote in a letter that the visit made a great impression on her brother. The forcible expulsion of the monks gave Wordsworth a few early misgivings about the revolution, which he initially overcame.  He wrote about it in Descriptive Sketches (1793) and then in "The Tuft of Primroses" (1808), an unfinished draft for the abortive Recluse. Finally the topic found a place in Book VI of the 1850 Prelude : it was Wordsworth's last major addition to his poem.  

This information comes from Joseph F. Kishel, The Wordsworth Circle vol. 12 no. 1 (Winter 1981), pp. 82-88. 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24040903

Here's the Chartreuse passage in Descriptive Sketches (1793):

But lo! the Alps ascending white in air,

Toy with the sun and glitter from afar.

And now, emerging from the forest's gloom,

I greet thee, Chartreuse, while I mourn thy doom.

Whither is fled that Power whose frown severe

Awed sober Reason till she crouched in fear?

'That' Silence, once in deathlike fetters bound,

Chains that were loosened only by the sound

Of holy rites chanted in measured round?

The voice of blasphemy the fane alarms,

The cloister startles at the gleam of arms.

The thundering tube the aged angler hears,

Bent o'er the groaning flood that sweeps away his tears.

Cloud-piercing pine-trees nod their troubled heads,

Spires, rocks, and lawns a browner night o'erspreads;

Strong terror checks the female peasant's sighs,

And start the astonished shades at female eyes.

From Bruno's forest screams the affrighted jay,

And slow the insulted eagle wheels away.

A viewless flight of laughing Demons mock

The Cross, by angels planted on the aerial rock.

The "parting Genius" sighs with hollow breath

Along the mystic streams of Life and Death.

Swelling the outcry dull, that long resounds

Portentous through her old woods' trackless bounds,

Vallombre, 'mid her falling fanes, deplores,

For ever broke, the sabbath of her bowers.

And here's the Chartreuse passage in the 1850 Prelude:

                                             Taking leave

Of this glad throng, foot-travellers side by side,

Measuring our steps in quiet, we pursued

Our journey, and ere twice the sun had set

Beheld the Convent of Chartreuse, and there

Rested within an awful solitude:

Yes, for even then no other than a place

Of soul-affecting solitude appeared

That far-famed region, though our eyes had seen,

As toward the sacred mansion we advanced,

Arms flashing, and a military glare

Of riotous men commissioned to expel

The blameless inmates, and belike subvert

That frame of social being, which so long

Had bodied forth the ghostliness of things

In silence visible and perpetual calm.

—"Stay, stay your sacrilegious hands!"—The voice

Was Nature's, uttered from her Alpine throne;

I heard it then and seem to hear it now—

"Your impious work forbear, perish what may,

Let this one temple last, be this one spot

Of earth devoted to eternity!"

She ceased to speak, but while St. Bruno's pines

Waved their dark tops, not silent as they waved,

And while below, along their several beds,

Murmured the sister streams of Life and Death,

Thus by conflicting passions pressed, my heart

Responded; "Honour to the patriot's zeal!

Glory and hope to new-born Liberty!

Hail to the mighty projects of the time!

Discerning sword that Justice wields, do thou

Go forth and prosper; and, ye purging fires,

Up to the loftiest towers of Pride ascend,

Fanned by the breath of angry Providence.

But oh! if Past and Future be the wings

On whose support harmoniously conjoined

Moves the great spirit of human knowledge, spare

These courts of mystery, where a step advanced

Between the portals of the shadowy rocks

Leaves far behind life's treacherous vanities,

For penitential tears and trembling hopes

Exchanged—to equalise in God's pure sight

Monarch and peasant: be the house redeemed

With its unworldly votaries, for the sake

Of conquest over sense, hourly achieved

Through faith and meditative reason, resting

Upon the word of heaven-imparted truth,

Calmly triumphant; and for humbler claim

Of that imaginative impulse sent

From these majestic floods, yon shining cliffs,

The untransmuted shapes of many worlds,

Cerulean ether's pure inhabitants,

These forests unapproachable by death,

That shall endure as long as man endures,

To think, to hope, to worship, and to feel,

To struggle, to be lost within himself

In trepidation, from the blank abyss

To look with bodily eyes, and be consoled."

Not seldom since that moment have I wished

That thou, O Friend! the trouble or the calm

Hadst shared, when, from profane regards apart,

In sympathetic reverence we trod

The floors of those dim cloisters, till that hour,

From their foundation, strangers to the presence

Of unrestricted and unthinking man.

Abroad, how cheeringly the sunshine lay

Upon the open lawns! Vallombre's groves

Entering, we fed the soul with darkness; thence

Issued, and with uplifted eyes beheld,

In different quarters of the bending sky,

The cross of Jesus stand erect, as if

Hands of angelic powers had fixed it there,

Memorial reverenced by a thousand storms;

Yet then, from the undiscriminating sweep

And rage of one State-whirlwind, insecure.

*

David Copperfield was serialized in 1849-1850 (just before Arnold wrote this poem). It was a novel that Arnold greatly admired. Towards the end the bereaved David finds himself in crisis, in an alpine landscape that seems at first to withhold its speech from him (compare the note on Stanza 2 above). I'm not suggesting this passage is a source for Arnold's poem but it's a fascinating analogue, both for its similarities and for its differences. 

I was in Switzerland. I had come out of Italy, over one of the great passes of the Alps, and had since wandered with a guide among the by-ways of the mountains. If those awful solitudes had spoken to my heart, I did not know it. I had found sublimity and wonder in the dread heights and precipices, in the roaring torrents, and the wastes of ice and snow; but as yet, they had taught me nothing else.

I came, one evening before sunset, down into a valley, where I was to rest. In the course of my descent to it, by the winding track along the mountain-side, from which I saw it shining far below, I think some long-unwonted sense of beauty and tranquillity, some softening influence awakened by its peace, moved faintly in my breast. I remember pausing once, with a kind of sorrow that was not all oppressive, not quite despairing. I remember almost hoping that some better change was possible within me.

I came into the valley, as the evening sun was shining on the remote heights of snow, that closed it in, like eternal clouds. The bases of the mountains forming the gorge in which the little village lay, were richly green; and high above this gentler vegetation, grew forests of dark fir, cleaving the wintry snow-drift, wedge-like, and stemming the avalanche. Above these, were range upon range of craggy steeps, grey rock, bright ice, and smooth verdure-specks of pasture, all gradually blending with the crowning snow. Dotted here and there on the mountain’s-side, each tiny dot a home, were lonely wooden cottages, so dwarfed by the towering heights that they appeared too small for toys. So did even the clustered village in the valley, with its wooden bridge across the stream, where the stream tumbled over broken rocks, and roared away among the trees. In the quiet air, there was a sound of distant singing—shepherd voices; but, as one bright evening cloud floated midway along the mountain’s-side, I could almost have believed it came from there, and was not earthly music. All at once, in this serenity, great Nature spoke to me; and soothed me to lay down my weary head upon the grass, and weep as I had not wept yet, since Dora died!

(From David Copperfield, Chapter 58)

*

Here's another post I enjoyed reading while preparing this post: 

Yuval Ben-Ami, "A Journey to the Impenetrable Monastery Where Monks Live in Isolation and Silence" (Haaretz, 9 January 2020):

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-the-impenetrable-monastery-where-monks-live-in-isolation-and-silence-1.8377062

*

On Matthew Arnold's The Scholar-Gipsy:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2019/02/notes-on-scholar-gipsy.html

On Matthew Arnold's Balder Dead:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2022/12/wanderings-in-arnolds-balder-dead.html

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