"A Summer Night"
What parts of the story are emphasized by the title?
Part I: Tristram
How is the poem structured? What effect is produced by the division into parts, and the ending? (sense of balance)
What is the effect of the opening scene? Of its setting? What do we learn about Tristram's past and present?
What role is served by the narrator? Do we know anything about him/her?
What are the rhythms of part I? Do these shift?
What is added by the presence of auditors? By the evocation of past memories?
How does Arnold render the lovers sympathetic?
What do we learn about Tristram's courtship of the second Iseult? (ll. 200-214)
What effect does his love for Iseult of Ireland have on Tristram's later life?
What do we learn of Iseult of Brittany's character and life? What purpose is served by portraying the sleeping children and their dreams?
What contrasting values are embodied in Tristram's two loves? Are these values ever harmonized?
Does Arnold seem to approve of the lovers' extramarital union? If not, why are we able to sympathize with the lovers' frustration? Does the poem seem to suggest the possibility of happy unions?
Part II: Iseult of Ireland
What is added by this section? Is the use of rhyme and dialogue effective?
What changes have the years brought to the lovers, and what has caused these? How does Iseult characterize her past life at court?
What new roles does she assume? What does she hope will be her relationship with the other Iseult? Why may this detail included?
Why is the detail about Tristram's name and birth added at this point?
What tableau is formed by the lovers' shared death? What details are provided about Iseult's emotions and past life in Ireland? What is the tone of the descriptions?
What is the purpose of adding the description of the hunting tapestry? Who may be the hunter who expresses surprise at his alien circumstances?
What do you make of the narrator's appeal to the hunter? (an echo of "Ode to a Grecian Urn") Is it comforting in this context that art will outlast life?
Part III: Iseult of Brittany
What is noticeable in the imagery and rhythms of part III? In general, how do the rhythms and structure of the poem reflect its content?
How have Tristram and Iseult been buried? Is this a surprise? Appropriate?
What do you think Arnold includes a section on Iseult of Brittany, an addition to his sources?
How is her physical environment described? Her psychological state? What activities is she associated with, and what is her relationship to her children?
Why is it important that she tell stories to her children? Are there parallels between this scene and the end of "Goblin Market"?
What interpretation is added by the narrator's reflections in lines 112ff? What does he find to be worse than sorrow? What does he believe are the effects of passion?
Are there parallels between this passage and "A Summer Night"?
What is the tale Iseult chooses to tell, and what is its meaning? Why doesn't she just tell her children of their father's behavior?
Is the fable of Merlin's seduction by Vivian an exact parallel to the plot, and if not, why is it included?
In the legend, who is blamed, Merlin or Vivien, and how is this significant? What is the tone of the poem's ending?
Where do you think Arnold's final sympathies lie? Does this poem resemble any of his other early poems in its themes?
How does Arnold's treatment of love and passion compare/contrast with that of other Victorian poets?
For example, what is the relation of this poem to Tennyson's famous treatment of the same legend? (preceeds it; Arnold's poem is less contemptuous of adulterous love, tries to present the desires of and ultimate consequences for both sides)
How does Arnold's poem anticipate/differ from Swinburne's 1882 Tristram of Lyonesse? (Swinburne is also sympathetic to the lovers, but his Iseult of Brittany is a vengeful woman.)
What seems the intention of this poem? Do you think casting philosophical reflections as a drama with three speakers adds to their interest?
Are there ways in which this poem resembles a Socratic dialogue? A classical drama?
Does the poem create a feeling of progression or suspense, and if so, what causes this?
Why does Arnold choose a mountain in Sicily for his setting? What are some of the historic associations of Mt. Etna?
What views are attributed to the historical Empedocles? Why do you think he has been cast as the poem’s hero? What are implications of casting a philosopher as protagonist for a poem which considers the possibility of a meaningful life?
What famous Romantic poem, set on a mountain in the Alps, apparently influenced Arnold’s choice of scene? What are some resemblances and differences between “Manfred” and “Empedocles on Etna”?
What does Callicles’s opening speech reveal about Empedocles and the latter’s attitude towards him? How is Empedocles’s appearance described?
How is the audience expected to Callicles’s account of his life and values? What function does he serve within the drama? (his lack of purpose contrasts with Empedocles’s seriousness)
Why may the songs of Callicles open the poem? Why is he chosen to sing the poem’s final song?
What role is served by Pausanius? How is he contrasted with Callicles and with Empedocles? (hopes to heal; both men unable to identify with the problems which harass him)
What has been Empedocles’s past occupation, and why has he had to leave it? Why do you think different accounts of his banishment are given?
What progression do we see in Empedocles mental states and life? Why can he not take pleasure in the things which appeal to others, such as art and human relationships? (always torn, constantly in a transitional state) Why does he believe this impasse can never be resolved?
What final ecstatic mood does he experience, and why does this cause him to end his life? What are his final thoughts, exclamations, and prayers as he leaps into the abyss?
To what extent does his plight evoke sympathy? Are there other Victorian poets/authors who expressed similar desires to escape their bodies? (cmp. Emily Bronte, “The Prisoner”)
How is the poem aided by its dramatic form and setting? How do the meter and stanza forms shift according to the identities and moods of different speakers? What poetic forms are employed by Empedocles himself?
Are the poem’s rhythms, stanza form and diction appropriate to its themes? (alternation of iambic pentameter and ecstatic, rhythmic choruses) What characterizes the poem’s closing stanzas?
What is the significance of Empedocles's final state? Is he at peace? What seems Arnold's attitude toward his condition?
How does the poem's final song reflect back on the emotions of the characters? Does it celebrate Empedocles or mourn him, and if not, why do you think it fails to do so? To what extent does this hymn provide closure?
Does this poem suggest any of the themes of “The Buried Life,” “A Summer Night,” and “Isolation: To Marguerite, continued”?
Do you find Empedocles’s final suicide inevitable, given his presuppositions?
What might have helped him take renewed interest in life? Are there alternative views of the human situation which Callicles, Pausanious, and Empedocles do not consider? Which Arnold himself suggests in “Dover Beach,” “The Buried Life” and other poems?
Is this a poem about depression? Is its ending tragic?
Why do you think Arnold later removed this poem from collections of his work?
Are there parallels between Arnold's poem and some of the much-criticized works by contemporary spasmodic poems such as Alexander Smith and Philip Bailey? How would you compare this poem and Tennyson poems of spiritual quest such as “The Holy Grail” (in Idylls of the King) or prose works such as Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus?
What relationship does this poem bear, if any, to the religious debates of the period? Does the portrayal of Empedocles exhibit any parallels with Christ? (he of course was exiled after a fashion, and also died, allegedly willingly)
(his father, headmaster of Rugby, had died in 1842)
written age 35
Do you think Arnold's poems reflect a similar sensibility to that of his essays? Are you surprised that the same man wrote both, and how do you account for their differences?
What are some ways in which Arnold resembles other Victorian poets of his period? What are some ways in which he differs from them? Why do you think he has been identified as in some ways a modern poet?
In marked contrast to those of Ruskin and Carlyle, Matthew Arnold's life doesn't seem to have inspired a long series of biographical controversies and efforts at psychosexual interpretation. Both George Saintsbury and Lionel Trilling may have been attracted to Arnold's life as a suitable subject for a history of intellectual development rather than a more personal form of biographical narrative. Arnold might also be seen as a paradigm case of movement from creative to critical preoccupations, and thus have validated the critical interests of his biographers.
Yet Arnold's life would seem to possess the same possibilities for dissection, skepticism, and defense as the lives of other Victorian intellectuals--the overpowering influence of his father; his family's high expectations; his intense and abortive feeling for Marguerite; his fear of multiplicity without an imposed order; his complaint of increasing emotional numbness and inability to feel; his close but often strained friendship with fellow-poet A. H. Clough; his biases concerning races, nations and forms of literary genius; his shift from painful retrospective lyrics to assured and judgmental social criticism--these would seem to provide material for a complex and interpretive biography.
Preface--biography will confine itself to official life (v), few facts can be wanted for someone whose life was in his mind, apart from family affections (vi--events of life of no significance to an explanation of intellectual life?), offers Victorian dichotomy between life and ideas. Saintsbury's lack of interest in Arnold's early emotional and mental development is almost shocking, "we could spare schoolboy letters, which, though often interesting, are pretty identical, save when written by little prigs." (1) Why does he write a biography at all?
Saintsbury regrets the loss of Arnold's Oxford letters, however, implying perhaps that the real development of Arnold's mind would have started at that institution. He comments on the Newdigate prize with offhand elitism (9, Saintsbury's manner perhaps embodies one aspect of Arnold's environment).
Saintsbury shows a total lack of interest in Arnold's affection for Marguerite (16), feels that whether "Marguerite" had a live original is impertinent to speculate (she did, of course). He is critical of Arnold's early romanticism, in his view possibly the "will-worship of Pride." In contrast to the practice of modern biographers, he refers to his subject as Mr. Arnold. He mentions his distaste for speculation (48); guesswork on taste unprofitable. How dissimilar to modern preferences in biography! He manages to find good external or professional reasons for Arnold's basic life choices, a kind of antidote to over-psychologizing approaches.
At times Saintsbury's social assumptions correspond with Arnold's, e. g. he approves of his unofficial legal duties (50) and supports Arnold's statements of contempt for Charlotte Bronte's rebellion and rage. At other times his distance is startling (79); in general he is sympathetic to Arnold's literary criticism and hostile to his social criticism (comparisons to Chesterfield/Socrates). He also seems to condemn Arnold from the vantage point of religious faith. In general, he seems to attack Arnold from the right, not the left. Interestingly Saintsbury feels Culture and Anarchy was by far "his worst, as it was by far his most popular, volume" (126). He seems to have disapproved of the pattern of literary critic who becomes a social commentator--cmp. his conservative disapproval of Ruskin's evolution into a social critic.
Interesting points in letters:
515 individuality, philosophic poetry, Shakespeare
516, 517 brief political references
518, 519 multitudinousness, idea, his own past desire of fullness
520 mystics, moral situation of England
521 no moral feeling while reading papers (cmp. J. S. Mill in Autobiography)
522 past thirty and three parts iced over
524 self in fragments
527 less interested in landscapes
526 art determined by spirit of age, 530
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