 Poetry: October 26, 2011 Issue [#4685] |
  Poetry
This week: Matthew Arnold Edited by: Stormy Lady  
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Growing Old
by Matthew Arnold
What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The lustre of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
Yes, but not for this alone.
Is it to feel our strength-
Not our bloom only, but our strength-decay?
Is it to feel each limb
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
Each nerve more weakly strung?
Yes, this, and more! but not,
Ah, 'tis not what in youth we dreamed 'twould be!
'Tis not to have our life
Mellowed and softened as with sunset-glow,
A golden day's decline!
'Tis not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirred;
And weep, and feel the fulness of the past,
The years that are no more!
It is to spend long days
And not once feel that we were ever young.
It is to add, immured
In the hot prison of the present, month
To month with weary pain.
It is to suffer this,
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel:
Deep in our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
But no emotion-none.
It is-last stage of all-
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.
Hayeswater by
Matthew Arnold
A region desolate and wild.
Black, chafing water: and afloat,
And lonely as a truant child
In a waste wood, a single boat:
No mast, no sails are set thereon;
It moves, but never moveth on:
And welters like a human thing
Amid the wild waves weltering.
Behind, a buried vale doth sleep,
Far down the torrent cleaves its way:
In front the dumb rock rises steep,
A fretted wall of blue and grey;
Of shooting cliff and crumbled stone
With many a wild weed overgrown:
All else, black water: and afloat,
One rood from shore, that single boat.
Matthew Arnold was born on December 24, 1822 in Laleham, Middlesex. Thomas Arnold and his wife Mary Penrose had four boys and three girls altogether. Matthew's father Thomas, was headmaster of Rugby. Matthew excelled in all his school studies. He won any school prizes for his essays and Latin and English poetry. In 1841 Matthew won a Scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. After getting his undergraduate degree he returned to Rugby as a teacher. Matthew won the Newdigate prize for poetry in 1843.
In 1845 he became private secretary to Lord Lansdowne. Matthew met and fell in love with Frances Lucy Wightman in 1850. He wanted to marry her but with his wages he could not support a wife and her father forbid them to wed. Later that same Matthew Arnold became an Inspector of Schools, with this new job he would earn enough to marry and on June 10, 1851 the two were married. Their first son Thomas, "Tommy" was born in July of 1852.
His first book of poetry was, "The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems." His second book "Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems" was published in 1852. In October of 1853 his second son Trevenen was born. His "Poems: Second Series" was published in 1855.A third son Richard Penrose "Dicky" was born in November 1855. His daughter Lucy Charlotte was born in December 1858. "Merope: A Tragedy" was published that same year. His second daughter Nelly was born in 1861. Before the birth of his daughter he was offered a position as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He stayed there until 1867. During his ten years at Oxford he wrote several volumes of literary, social and religious criticism. "Essays in Criticism" published in 1865 and "Culture and Anarchy" published in1869. Matthew was faces with hardship in 1868, his youngest son was born in January 1868 he died shortly after birth. Then that November his eldest son "Tommy" dies after falling off a horse.
In 1869 Matthew published "St. Paul and Protestantism." That fallowing year he was honored by Oxford with the degree of Doctor of Civil Law. Then tragedy hit again in February 1872, with the death of his son, Trevenen. Matthew published "Literature and Dogma" a year after his son death. The sequel "God and the Bible" was published in 1873 and then " Last Essays on Church and Religion" in 1877.
Matthew had stopped publishing his poems by the time he was forty and spent the second half of his life writing essays and traveling. Matthew traveled for lectures in the US from 1883 to 1886. In 1886 he was appointed "Chief Inspector" for the Cross Commission on primary schools. Two years later on April 15, 1888, Matthew Arnold died of heart complications in Liverpool. He is buried at All Saints churchyard, Laleham-on-Thames.
Youth and Calm
by Matthew Arnold
'Tis death! and peace, indeed, is here,
And ease from shame, and rest from fear.
There's nothing can dismarble now
The smoothness of that limpid brow.
But is a calm like this, in truth,
The crowning end of life and youth,
And when this boon rewards the dead,
Are all debts paid, has all been said?
And is the heart of youth so light,
Its step so firm, its eye so bright,
Because on its hot brow there blows
A wind of promise and repose
From the far grave, to which it goes;
Because it hath the hope to come,
One day, to harbour in the tomb?
Ah no, the bliss youth dreams is one
For daylight, for the cheerful sun,
For feeling nerves and living breath--
Youth dreams a bliss on this side death.
It dreams a rest, if not more deep,
More grateful than this marble sleep;
It hears a voice within it tell:
Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well.
'Tis all perhaps which man acquires,
But 'tis not what our youth desires.
Thank you all!
Stormy Lady
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The winner of "Stormy's poetry newsletter & contest" [ASR] is:
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I saw a werewolf sitting on my lanai
sipping a cosmopolitan under a moonlit sky.
He was dark, lean, curvy and long
evoking feelings erotically strong.
Zombies, witches, and ghouls were near,
but he showed absolutely no fear.
Breathless, my chest filled with delight
as I feasted upon the alpha werewolf sight.
He looked at me with a wet glitter in his eyes
causing my pulse to suddenly energize.
He was an artist molding clay
and I surrendered as he sauntered my way.
It took me a while to understand
just who the werewolf was holding my hand.
I will never forget that all hollows eve
or the transformation of my husband, Steve
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