This post will be going back to a time when Victorian poems came in photographically-illustrated editions. So I may as well begin with a statement that makes me sound at least 100 years old: I often think of Matthew Arnold at this time of year.
It happens when I spot the spring flower known as a snake’s-head fritillary, as I did over the Easter weekend. It likes to grow in damp places, and its delicate checkered shading, which ranges between pale and purple, always reminds me of these lines from Arnold’s poem, “Thyrsis”, first published in April 1866:
Arnold is talking about the rural landscape around Oxford, which is where “Thyrsis” is set — the poem is an elegy for his student friend, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, with whom he used to go on country walks.
Seeing a fritillary sends me to wildflower guides, which remind me of its spectacular popular names — Bloody Warrior, Solemn Bells of Sodom, Turkey’s Eggs, Leopard’s Lily —and the curious etymology of its botanical name: Fritallaria meleagris, from fritillus, “a dice box”, seemingly for the squat cup-shape of its flowers, although it has also been suggested it refers to the lattice pattern of the see-through “dice tower” that the Romans invented to stop players cheating. (If so, whoever added meleagris — “speckled guinea-fowl” — obviously thought the checkered bit wasn’t very clear.)
None of this is directly relevant to Arnold’s poem, which instead finds in “fritillaries” a unique rhyme of species and habitat: “Thames’s tributaries”. But leafing through natural history books feels in the spirit of the elegy, which remembers a friendship by recreating its landscape. The emotional urgency of “Thyrsis” is tied up with knowing the natural world; fixing it — in names and rhymes — as it changes with the seasons. In the spring after Clough died, Arnold walked their old Oxford haunts, reporting how, along the river, “I […] filled my hands with fritillaries, half of them white ones”.
“Once I knew each field, each flower, each stick”, he laments in “Thyrsis”. But as the elegy grows in feeling, this knowledge returns. The following lines are moving precisely because they catch a note of confidence just as the stanza shape tapers, so that they simultaneously seem to grow quieter, as though whispering confidentially:
“The Fyfield tree” alludes to a landmark mentioned in Arnold’s earlier poem about his walks with Clough, “The Scholar-Gipsy” (1853), which tells the story of a hippy-ish figure the young poets imagined haunting their walks: an Oxford academic who took to rambling the countryside in search of mystical illumination. Among those who claim to have seen him are “Maidens, who […] dance around the Fyfield elm in May”.
It is this felt specificity, of place and plant, that makes me admire these poems, and overlook the high-table, high-cravat aspects of their antique imagery and language: those “maidens”, along with various other “smock-frock’d boors”, are part of the world of classical pastoral poetry around which Arnold weaves his real memories (“Thyrsis”, his name for Clough, is a shepherd in Virgil’s Eclogues). The poems could not exist without this learned scaffolding, which Arnold builds skilfully, using a grand ten-line stanza that echoes Keats’s Odes. But it does at times lead him into lines that could be from a truly terrible poem e.g.
Here cam’st thou in thy jocund youthful time.
So when, in an box of old books, I came across an illustrated guide from 1918 to The Oxford Poems of Matthew Arnold, complete with a map, photographs and a section called “Rambles with Matthew Arnold”, I was delighted. Here was the ideal edition of “The Scholar Gipsy” and “Thyrsis”, published only thirty years after Arnold’s death, which would bring the reality of their world to life.
But I was wrong: reading the poems in this book only makes their pastoral beauty more elusive and unreal.
As a guidebook, The Oxford Poems of Matthew Arnold is the literary equivalent of an open-top bus tour: a money-spinning rattle through an old place which asks you to forget about urbanised modernity. “No notice need be taken of the ‘Trespass boards’”, it advises readers following Arnold’s route through what is now a built-up area: “Fifty years ago, they were not here.”
The author, Henry W. Taunt, seems to have been a one-man tourist industry of the “dreaming spires” — that flogged-to-death description of Oxford which comes from “Thyrsis”. The most obvious problem with his attempt to bring its other words to life is the photographs. If Arnold’s classical pastoralism seems stiff and affected (he speaks of the “silly sheep” in the Elizabethan sense, meaning “innocent, helpless”), it is at least not as silly as its twentieth-century re-enactment:
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