Sadly descends the autumn evening

The scene is Autumn, but Matthew Arnold's long poem “Rugby Chapel” (November, 1857) is not about the season at all. A gloomy autumn evening in the grounds of Rugby school leads to a reverie about his father, the former headmaster; how he was one of those bright, heroic Victorian souls (like Tennyson's Ulysses) who helped round up the doubters and stragglers and keep them on the road to glory. The poem is stitched together from fragments of Thomas Arnold's sermons. I could imagine his earnest but skeptical son, like so many of his generation, looking back on this glowing and strenuous certainty with genuine nostalgia through the gathering darkness. 

Coldly, sadly descends
The autumn evening. The Field
Strewn with its dank yellow drifts
Of wither’d leaves, and the elms,
Fade into dimness apace,
Silent;—hardly a shout
From a few boys late at their play!
The lights come out in the street,
In the school-room windows; but cold,
Solemn, unlighted, austere,
Through the gathering darkness, arise
The Chapel walls, in whose bound
Thou, my father! art laid.[...]

What is the course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth?—
Most men eddy about
Here and there—eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurl’d in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving
Nothing; and, then they die—
Perish; and no one asks
Who or what they have been,
More than he asks what waves
In the moonlit solitudes mild
Of the midmost Ocean, have swell’d,
Foam’d for a moment, and gone.[...]

See! in the rocks of the world
Marches the host of mankind,
A feeble, wavering line.
Where are they tending?—A God
Marshall’d them, gave them their goal.—
Ah, but the way is so long!
Years they have been in the wild!
Sore thirst plagues them; the rocks,
Rising all round, overawe.
Factions divide them; their host
Threatens to break, to dissolve.
Ah, keep, keep them combined!
Else, of the myriads who fill
That army, not one shall arrive!
Sole they shall stray; in the rocks
Labour for ever in vain,
Die one by one in the waste.

Then, in such hour of need
Of your fainting, dispirited race,
Ye, like angels, appear,
Radiant with ardour divine.
Beacons of hope, ye appear!
Languor is not in your heart,
Weakness is not in your word,
Weariness not on your brow.
Ye alight in our van; at your voice,
Panic, despair, flee away.
Ye move through the ranks, recall
The stragglers, refresh the outworn,
Praise, re-inspire the brave.
Order, courage, return.
Eyes rekindling, and prayers,
Follow your steps as ye go.
Ye fill up the gaps in our files,
Strengthen the wavering line,
Stablish, continue our march,
On, to the bound of the waste,
On, to the City of God.

Read the whole poem, and an excellent short biography of Arnold here.

He lives, he wakes

This is Shelley on the death of Keats, but today it could be for the resurrected Christ: alive, awake, the light and life and song of all creation. Praise him.

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep—
He hath awakened from the dream of life—
’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife
Invulnerable nothings.—We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay [...]

He lives, he wakes—’tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais.—Thou young Dawn,
Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone;
Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan!
Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air
Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown
O’er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare
Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!

He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where’er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

White sleep and silence

Another poet I’d never heard of: James Russell Lowell, who seems, nevertheless, to bestride the nineteenth century like a Colossus. He was born and died in the same big old house in Cambridge, Massachussetts, but between his birth in 1819 and his death in 1891, he travelled the world, wrote, edited and lectured, met kings, queens and presidents, outlived two wives and three of his four children, and more than once stood on the brink of suicide. He went to Harvard at 15 to study law and returned at 36 to lecture on languages. He never practiced law. He was an abolitionist who seemed to believe in white superiority, and a temperance advocate who drank heavily. He was one of the New England ‘Fireside Poets’, a group that also included the euphonious names of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier, but he also served as America’s ambassador to Spain, then England. He edited journals: his first, The Pioneer, only lasted three issues, but in one of those appeared a short story called “The Tell-Tale Heart,” by one Edgar Allen Poe. A little later, he was the first editor of The Atlantic Monthly, now in its 158^th year. He knew Emerson and the Brownings and Leigh Hunt and Henry James. He was the grandcestor of poets Amy Lowell and Robert Lowell, and the godfather of Virginia Woolf. His achievements were many but his legacy is ambivalent. His poetic vocation was sincere, but his verse was often derivative. He was both praised and pilloried by his contemporaries, and is now largely forgotten. He said of himself, “I shall be popular by and by.”

Here are three stanzas of his poem “An Indian-Summer Reverie,” which runs to five pages. Notably, the unrhymable word ‘purple’ appears in the poem no fewer than six times, including the variant ‘purpler,’ though never at the end of a line. It's not great poetry but there are felicities here I'd be sorry to miss.

What visionary tints the year puts on,
When falling leaves falter through motionless air
Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone!
How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare,
As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills
The bowl between me and those distant hills,
And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!

How fuse and mix, with what unfelt degrees,
Clasped by the faint horizon’s languid arms,
Each into each, the hazy distances!
The softened season all the landscape charms;
Those hills, my native village that embay,
In waves of dreamier purple roll away,
And floating in mirage seem all the glimmering farms.

O’er yon bare knoll the pointed cedar shadows
Drowse on the crisp, gray moss; the ploughman’s call
Creeps faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows;
The single crow a single caw lets fall;
And all around me every bush and tree
Says Autumn’s here, and Winter soon will be
Who snows his soft, white sleep and silence over all.

Roads diverge

So this week I'm walking to raise money for the women and girls who spend their lives walking. (You can sponsor me here!) Much less depends on my walk than on theirs, but the idea is to walk in their shoes, at least some part of the way. That set me thinking, naturally, of poems about walking, and there are many. Walking has a rich literature, even more so in prose; after all, prose is a kind of walking. According to this literature, there's a mysterious affinity between walking and thinking, and a persistent allegory between walking and living. Even as I write this I'm conscious of the gulf between poor women walking for their lives, and privileged men walking for their own amusement, but if part of that privilege is having written some beautiful poetry about it, that at least can be shared. Here are some bits of Whitman, Pound and Frost: poems to travel by. 

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. [...]

You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here,
I believe that much unseen is also here. [...]

All parts away for the progress of souls,
All religion, all solid things, arts, governments—all that was or is apparent upon this globe or any globe, falls into niches and corners before the procession of souls along the grand roads of the universe.

         (Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road”) 

At Rochecoart,
Where the hills part
                            In three ways,
And three valleys, full of winding roads,
Fork out to south and north,
There is a place of trees . . . grey with lichen.
I have walked there
                            Thinking of old days.

         (Ezra Pound, “Provincia Deserta” - March, 1915)

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended. 

         (Robert Frost, “Reluctance”)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, 

And sorry I could not travel both 

And be one traveler, long I stood 

And looked down one as far as I could 

To where it bent in the undergrowth; 

Then took the other...

         (Robert Frost, “The Road not Taken”)

Like a dim picture of the drowned past

Lately I've been straying beyond the canon, reading some authors who loomed large in their own day and are now largely forgotten. Rosamond Lehmann, for one, and Mrs Humphrey Ward, for another (of whom more presently). So here's an Autumn poem by one Thomas Hood, unknown to me until a week ago, but well known in early Victorian England as a poet, humourist and journalist, editor of literary magazines and publisher of verses and tales. It's simply called “Ode—Autumn.” The whole thing is rather long, so I include here only the first, third and fourth stanzas, which in my view are better worth your reading. I like the craft of it (things like alliteration and internal rhyme), and the more mysterious creation of atmosphere: silence, solitude, dampness, dimness, melancholy. I like “silence, listening to silence”, and the honey bees' “luscious cells”. You can see why, perhaps, it hasn't survived the way Keats or Blake have, but I think it deserves to be retrieved, if briefly, from the grey distance, the drowned past.

I
I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless, like silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn,
Nor lowly hedge nor solitary thorn;—
Shaking his languid locks all dewy bright
With tangled gossamer that fell by night,  
   Pearling his coronet of golden corn. 

III
Where are the blooms of Summer?—In the west,
Blushing their last to the last sunny hours,
When the mild Eve by sudden Night is prest
Like tearful Prosperpine, snatch’d from her flow’rs
   To a most gloomy breast.
Where is the pride of Summer,—the green prime,—
The many, many leaves all twinkling?—Three
On the moss’d elm; three on the naked lime
Trembling,—and one upon the old oak tree!
   Where is the Dryad’s immortality?—
Gone into mournful cypress and dark yew,
Or wearing the long gloomy Winter through
In the smooth holly’s green eternity.

IV
The squirrel gloats on his accomplish’d hoard,
The ants have brimm’d their garners with ripe grain,
   And honey bees have stor’d
The sweets of Summer in their luscious cells;
The swallows all have wing’d across the main;
But here the Autumn melancholy dwells,
   And sighs her tearful spells
Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain,
   Alone, alone,
   Upon a mossy stone,
She sits and reckons up the dead and gone
With the last leaves for a love-rosary,
Whilst all the wither’d world looks drearily,
Like a dim picture of the drowned past
In the hush’d mind’s mysterious far away,
Doubtful what ghostly thing will steal the last
Into that distance, gray upon the gray.