SELF – DEPENDENCE - Matthew Arnold

SELF – DEPENDENCE - Matthew Arnold

General survey of Matthew Arnold as a classicist.

Matthew Arnold is almost a classicist in his insistence on a code of conduct for the poet. It is stated thus in the preface to the Poems that the object of poetry is to make men happy. That its subjects are actions rather than thoughts, and that the style is but a means to achieve these objects rather than an end in itself, as with the Romantics, since his Victorians/ Victorian Age was prevailingly romantic, it was impossible for him to follow this ideal completely. While the spirit of his work is classical its form is romantic. He is neither an extreme classicist, nor an extreme romanticist.

His Melancholy:

Added to his incapacity to find a solution for the ills of the age was the loss of faith. Melancholy therefore is the prevailing not of his poetry. In fact, it inspires some of his best verse. The loss of religious faith made him aware of yet another, and a vaster, danger that the Universe itself was without any direction, that:

We are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by nights!

                                                --- Dover Beach.

His treatment of Nature:

Nature in his poems is what it is in life, with little added to it from the poet’s own mind. In the accuracy of his observation and in its precise rendering in words he is even superior to Tennyson. Arnold believed too that constituted as the world was, Nature was a fellow-sufferer with man and that what in her pleasant aspects she offered was not joy, as the poets fondly believed, but peace. The objects of Nature, he says in Resignation.

If I might lend their life a voice,

Seem to bear rather than rejoice.

The Poem: The Self-dependence

Matthew Arnold believed that in future literature would take the place of religion in giving man comfort and sustenance. His literary and social criticism is informed by lofty moral considerations and his poetry has an exquisitely elegiac and plaintive tone.

Arnold expresses his favourite idea of the permanence and calm of nature as opposed to the ‘weariness, the fever and the fret’ of human life in his poem Self-Dependence. The spiritual unrest of the Victorians came in the wake of scientific discoveries, and this conflict is poignantly felt and clearly expressed by poets like Tennyson and Arnold.

Weary of myself, and sick of asking

What I am, and what I ought to be,

At this vessel’s prow I stand, which bears me

Forwards, forwards, o’er the starlit sea.

The very opening lines of the poem are striking the note of melancholic mood of the poet, metaphorically describing as a voyage through a mysterious sea standing at prow of the vessel symbolically of his life.

The poet entreats the stars, eternal and never changing, to quiet the tumultuous beatings of his heart with passionate desire and to give him peace and solace to his mind.

Ye who from my childhood up have calm’s me,

Calm me, ah, compose me to the end!

He fervently requesting the stars and Nature which passionately influencing his conscience and mind and quell the agitation of his mind.

The stars and sea used to have a magic influence on his heart in bringing him peace and joy. He now implores them to suppress the fluttering of his heart and to give him a serene tranquility of mind.

Unaffrighted by the silence round them,

Undistracted by the sights they see,

These demand not that the things without them

Yield them love, amusement, sympathy.

The stars and the sky are not frightened of their loneliness of confused by what they see around them; they do not demand that they should be given love, amusement or sympathy. So too man who is lonely in spiritual life should not be frightened of that loneliness. He should not be disturbed by what he sees around him; he should pursue his self-appointed path without asking for love or sympathy or amusement.

Resolve to be thyself; and know that he,

Who finds himself, loses his misery!

The stars and sea fulfil their great task by pouring into their attention and all their energy without distracting themselves by what others are doing.

In the concluding lines of the poem poet gives the message is the corner stone of Indian philosophy on Self-Dependence- be true to yourself. He, who realizes himself, loses his misery. With self-realization comes calm of mind.

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