Difference between revisions of "Matthew Arnold"

Revision as of 12:21, 14 October 2017

the most impt thing, as Charles would say, is that "the sea of faith" is still pretty full in the 1850s: so in a way this isn't so much a genuine poem of religious pessimism as a lyric utterance of the position of religious pessimism (or it is that but it's also an examination of the position)
first stanza is 14 lines, like a tangled sonnet
strong caesuras moving around in the line in first stanza a rhythmic effect, then in 33-4 it switches so that pauses are less rhythmic than accumulative/enumerative
"roar" repeated: of the sea but also embodied, chagrined, and repressed or muffled, like the "ignorant armies clash[ing] by night"
second stanza: Sophocles and the speaker finding "also in the sound a thought" - empty natural phenomena that the lyric subject fills with a content, dramatizing the struggle of that
"the moon-blanched land": its light is as alien, it feels like, as the speaker's vision
"so new": again, as Armstrong 1993, the self-consciousness/anxiety about modernity

the interplay between forms: pastoral and narrative, ballad (almost) and "plaint,"
the interplay of time: shifting from narrative present to Glanvil, then to timeless pastoral, then specific temporal pastoral, then back to the ancient Greeks
- in a way he's imploring the scholar-gipsy to stay outside time
the situation is predicated on reading, too: the book is next to him
modern condition reflection: 141-210 especially

@@ Line 11: / Line 11: @@
 ==The Scholar-Gipsy==
+* the interplay between forms: pastoral and narrative, ballad (almost) and "plaint,"
+* the interplay of time: shifting from narrative present to Glanvil, then to timeless pastoral, then specific temporal pastoral, then back to the ancient Greeks
+** in a way he's imploring the scholar-gipsy to stay outside time
+* the situation is predicated on reading, too: the book is next to him
+* modern condition reflection: 141-210 especially