What kind of a poem is Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis"? The answer has seemed self-evident ever since it was published in 1861: it is an elegy, more specifically a pastoral elegy, occasioned by the death of Arnold's friend and fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough five years earlier in Florence. "Thyrsis" is the third of the three great pastoral elegies in English poetry, the other two being Milton's "Lycidas" and Shelley's "Adonais." But is "Thyrsis" a pastoral elegy in quite the same way that "Lycidas" and "Adonais" are.7 Over forty years ago, Richard Giannone was not sure that it is: "Thyrsis' is something of an anomaly among pastoral elegies," he wrote. "One could justifiably call it a pastoral elegy manqué in so far as Arnold stops considerably short of the kind of complete shaping of the poem according to the pastoral conventions one finds, say, in Spenser's November eclogue or Astrophel, or in 'Lycidas.'"3 Yet no one has followed up on Giannone's questioning of the poem's genre, which continues to seem self-evident to critics. In his still influential study of Arnold's poetry, A. Dwight Culler distinguishes "Thyrsis" from "The ScholarGipsy," to which it is frequently compared, by stressing its different generic identity: "The Scholar-Gipsy," he says, is "primarily a Romantic dream-vision which creates an ideal figure who lives outside of time, whereas [Thyrsis'] is an elegy about a human figure who lived in time and was thereby destroyed" (p. 250). David Riede discusses "Thyrsis" along with "The Scholar-Gipsy" under the heading "Pastoral and Elegy,"4 and in the most recent commentary on the poem, Patrick Connolly reiterates the poem's dependence on the "long ancestral line" of pastoral elegy: "As a poem 'Thyrsis' falls within the pastoral elegy form, though this may not be obvious at first reading. Consequently it is dependent on a long ancestral line of such poetry from Shelley and Milton to Moschus and Theocritus."5 This unproblematic classification of "Thyrsis" as a pastoral elegy has
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What kind of a poem is Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis"? The answer has seemed
self-evident ever since it was published in 1861: it is an elegy, more
specifically a pastoral elegy, occasioned by the death of Arnold's friend and
fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough five years earlier in Florence. "Thyrsis" is
the third of the three great pastoral elegies in English poetry, the other two
being Milton's "Lycidas" and Shelley's "Adonais." But is "Thyrsis" a pastoral
elegy in quite the same way that "Lycidas" and "Adonais" are.7 Over forty
years ago, Richard Giannone was not sure that it is: "Thyrsis' is something
of an anomaly among pastoral elegies," he wrote. "One could justifiably call
it a pastoral elegy manqué in so far as Arnold stops considerably short of
the kind of complete shaping of the poem according to the pastoral
conventions one finds, say, in Spenser's November eclogue or Astrophel, or
in 'Lycidas.'"3 Yet no one has followed up on Giannone's questioning of the
poem's genre, which continues to seem self-evident to critics. In his still
influential study of Arnold's poetry, A. Dwight Culler distinguishes "Thyrsis"
from "The ScholarGipsy," to which it is frequently compared, by stressing
its different generic identity: "The Scholar-Gipsy," he says, is "primarily a
Romantic dream-vision which creates an ideal figure who lives outside of
time, whereas [Thyrsis'] is an elegy about a human figure who lived in time
and was thereby destroyed" (p. 250). David Riede discusses "Thyrsis" along
with "The Scholar-Gipsy" under the heading "Pastoral and Elegy,"4 and in
the most recent commentary on the poem, Patrick Connolly reiterates the
poem's dependence on the "long ancestral line" of pastoral elegy: "As a
poem 'Thyrsis' falls within the pastoral elegy form, though this may not be
obvious at first reading. Consequently it is dependent on a long ancestral
line of such poetry from Shelley and Milton to Moschus and Theocritus."5
This unproblematic classification of "Thyrsis" as a pastoral elegy has
ensured that critics, by never looking at the poem from an alternative
generic perspective, see only what they habitually expect to find in pastoral
elegies instead of seeing what Arnold actually wrote.
"We often think of genre designation as one of the last acts a reader
performs- and to some extent it is true that a work's precise generic
placement is often unclear until we have finished reading it," says Peter
Rabinowitz in Before Reading. "But some preliminary generic judgment is
always required even before we begin the process of reading. We can never
interpret entirely outside generic structures: 'reading'- even reading of a
first paragraph- is always 'reading as.'"6 No poem, least of all one assumed
to belong to so conventional a form as the pastoral elegy, stands "entirely
outside generic structures," and so when we read "Thyrsis" as a pastoral
elegy, it is difficult to avoid succumbing to the force of generic conventions,
the recognition that it is one of a family of similar poems, and thus to be led
very quickly from what the individual work is actually saying to what we
assume the generic structure to which it belongs is saying through the
work. On the other hand, there is no possibility of not reading intertextually,
since no work exists entirely outside generic conventions. So the question
"Thyrsis" presents, then, is not whether to read it intertextually- there is no
choice other than to do so- but rather what poems constitute the most
relevant and illuminating inter-texts? Or, to pose the question another way:
what kind of poem is "Thyrsis" and in what generic tradition(s) does it
participate? Without denying its indisputable affiliations with the pastoral
elegy (with "Lycidas" as its most influential English representative) and with
the broader pastoral tradition that "The Scholar-Gipsy" participates in, I
propose to argue that the exclusive classification of "Thyrsis" as a pastoral
elegy has prevented us from recognizing that it is, in fact, a generically
mixed lyric that combines the conventions of the classical pastoral elegy
with the new kind of poem we now identify as distinctively Romantic, the
lyric genre that M. H. Abrams calls the greater Romantic lyric.7
Although the title and sub-title of "Thyrsis: A Monody, to Commemorate the
Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough, Who Died at Florence, 1861" create
the expectation of a conventional pastoral elegy, the poem (as Giannone
perceived) deviates noticeably from the classical paradigm exemplified by
"Lycidas." It might just as appropriately have been titled, in imitation of
Wordsworth or Shelley, "Elegiac Stanzas Written in the Cumner Hills." For
what had intervened between the classically inspired "Lycidas" and Arnold's
mid-Victorian elegy is, of course, Romanticism, which changed forever the
landscape of English poetry. Given Arnold's widely acknowledged complex
relationship to the Romantic poets, it should come as no surprise that his
mid-Victorian elegy follows, even while it modifies, the structural pattern of
Abrams' greater Romanic lyric. As numerous critics have observed, "Dover
Beach" is a later instance of that form, and Michael O'Neill has recently
pointed out that "A Summer Night" "owes much to the structure of what M.
H. Abrams calls 'the Greater Romantic Lyric.'"8 What has not been noticed,
however, is how thoroughly Arnold has integrated the structure of the
Romantic lyric into his "pastoral elegy manqué." Rather than approaching
"Thyrsis" as the last example of a form on the verge of extinction, then, I
propose to read it as a generically mixed poem, one that experimentally
fuses what appear to be two incompatible genres.
Although the elegy as a form has undergone renewed interest in recent
decades, the position of "Thyrsis" in Arnold's poetic canon has declined over
the same period. "During the past twenty years," says Melissa Zeiger in
Beyond Consofótion, her study of the changing shapes of elegy from
Swinburne to the present, "elegies have been more prolifically written,
intensively studied, and resourcefully theorized than poems in practically
any other traditional genre ___ Because of its privileged poetic status, elegy
has been a primary site of critical renegotiation."9 This revival of interest in
elegy as a "privileged" poetic genre has inexplicably overlooked, bypassed,
or simply ignored "Thyrsis," which has received so little critical attention in
recent decades that it seems doubtful whether it can still be regarded as
one of Arnold's major poems. Peter Sacks is satisfied to give it only one and
a half pages at the end of his chapter on Jn Memoriam in his major study of
the English elegy.10 Even among Arnold's dwindling number of admirers,
its position in his poetic canon has declined to the point that Alan Grob
allows it less than a page in his recent study of Arnold's poetry, A Longing
Like Despair: Arnold's Poetry of Pessimism (2002)." The only major analyses
of it in the last twenty-five years are those by William E. Buckler in On the
Poetry of Matthew Arnold: Essays in Critical Reconstruction (1982), by
David G. Riede in Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language (1988), and
by W. David Shaw in Elegy & Paradox: Testing the Conventions (1994).12
A likely explanation for the decline of the poem's reputation is the
widespread feeling among critics that by the time Arnold came to write a
pastoral elegy in the second half of the nineteenth century, the form was
outdated. Alastair Fowler's speculations about the death of literary genres
in his essay "The Life and Death of Literary Forms" are particularly relevant
to "Thyrsis": "Does a genre die when it ceases to be used? Or when it is no
longer regarded with interest? Or when readers become insensitive to its
form?"13 Although the pastoral elegy was not quite dead in 1866, after
Arnold the genre quickly slipped from the repertoire of major poets, and
serious readers of poetry no longer regarded it with interest. "In an age in
which the Great Western Railway roared ever closer to the very center of
Oxford," writes John Rosenberg, "pastoral had become an endangered
species, threatening to collapse into potted Wordsworth or reheated Keats"
(p. 149). Although many pastoral elegies would later be written to mourn
soldiers killed in World War I, not a single one has survived as a canonical
Great War poem. Owen's bitterly ironic "Anthem for Doomed Youth"
answers to the modern requirements of an elegy. Yeats, after composing a
pastoral elegy, "Shepherd and Goatherd," on the death of Robert Gregory,
implicitly acknowledged the inappropriateness of the form by quickly
composing "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory." If, as Fowler says, "the
pastoral eclogue could not survive changes in the relation of town and
country that followed urban development" (p. 207), it has seemed obvious to
many poets as well as critics that neither could the pastoral elegy. "The old
consoling formulae," as Peter Sacks observes, "now [i.e., post-War] seem
not only obsolete but hypocritical. . . . Few poets of this century have even
tried to write such a poem."14 One cannot imagine W. H. Auden writing his
latemodern "Elegy on the Death of William Butler Yeats" (1939) in the
antique form of a pastoral elegy, casting himself as Corydon and Yeats as
Thyrsis.
If, however, we cease reading "Thyrsis" only as a pastoral elegy and instead
read it as a transformation of the pastoral elegy into a Romantic lyric, the
poem will seem less like a "throwback" to an earlier, antiquated form and
more like what in fact it is- a mixed genre that subsumes the pastoral elegy
within a new lyric genre that had attained its definitive form only sixty years
earlier. "Since new works," writes Fowler, "often seem to mix existing types-
successfully or unsuccessfully- many critical evaluations have to be in
generic terms" (p. 203). One advantage of reading "Thyrsis" as a mixed
genre is that doing so explains the two most common criticisms of the
poem: that it focuses too much on Arnold and not enough on Clough, and
that the ending does not provide the resolution readers expect from an
elegy. These alleged weaknesses can be explained, and to some extent
mitigated, by the poem's deliberate oscillation between its two genres,
classical elegy and Romantic lyric. Clough is the central figure in the elegy
proper, as Lycidas is in Milton's monody, but when "Thyrsis" is read as a
Romantic lyric, with Clough playing the role of the silent auditor/addressee,
as in one of Coleridge's conversation poems, Arnold is obviously the central
figure. And finally, by changing the generic lens through which we view
"Thyrsis," it may even be possible to reverse the decline in reputation the
poem has suffered in recent years, as well as add to our understanding of
how old genres are always being transformed into new ones.
II
The challenge facing Arnold as he composed "Thyrsis"- how to successfully
combine two seemingly incompatible genres, classical elegy and Romantic
lyric- arose from the question of whether a classical form, such as the
pastoral elegy, could still be written in the middle of the nineteenth century.
This question is anticipated by the unexpected presence, in the first stanza,
of the realistic reference to the two towns of North and South Hinksey,
which are significantly mentioned before the conventional, and hence
expected, reference to the pastoral setting of the Cumnor hills near Oxford.
In the first of Arnold's many deviations from the inherited pattern of the
pastoral elegy, the opening lines juxtapose the poetic past, connoted by the
classical name Thyrsis (a character not seen in a major English poem since
Pope's Pastorals) with the urban present, represented by the two Hinkseys,
which have undergone major changes since Arnold and Clough were
undergraduates. As the reader later discovers, Arnold has changed too- the
painful awareness of change and the attendant sense of loss are primary
themes of the poem- and so the broader question that Arnold has to address
is how he, or any poet, can today write poems that, while remaining true to
the tradition going back through Milton to classical Greece, will be read in
the two Hinkseys, whose changes since Arnold attended Oxford are a
metonym for the larger changes transforming English society.
Since Arnold, as Antony Harrison says, "is the most pervasively intertextual
of Victorian poets,"15 it is not surprising that, to solve the formal problem
of how to write a modern classical elegy, Arnold should have turned to a
precedent. Over a century earlier, Thomas Gray successfully combined the
conventional funeral elegy with the new lyric poem of meditation and
description, of which Robert Blair's The Grave (1743) was a typical
example, to create one of the most famous and most quoted poems in
English, the "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." As Anne Williams has
shown in her illuminating study Prophetic Strain: The Greater Romantic
Lyric in the Eighteenth Century, Gray's "Elegy" is a transformation of the
funeral elegy into lyric whose form is "closely akin to 'the greater Romantic
Lyric'" as defined by M. H. Abrams.16 And so when Arnold came to write
"Thyrsis," he had a celebrated and successful model of how to fuse classical
elegy with modern lyric. The relevant inter-texts for an appreciation of
Arnold's experiment in lyric form, then, are Gray's "Elegy Written in
Country Churchyard," rather than "Lycidas," and the Romantic lyric typified
by Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight,"
rather than "The Scholar-Gipsy."17
The generic imprint of Gray's "Elegy" on "Thyrsis" is clearly discernible,
even more than that of Milton's "Lycidas." Although Gray's famous poem-
certainly more widely read and probably more influential in the century
after its composition than "Lycidas"- was published by Gray himself as
"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," it was entitled "Stanza's [sic]
Written in a Country Church-yard" when published in 1751 in the Magazine
of Magazines, and the manuscript bears the title "Stanzas Wrote in a
Country Chuchyard." But, as Williams has pointed out, "to the eighteenth-
century reader familiar with Lycidas, this [Elegy] would have seemed a
considerable departure from the familiar conventions" (p. 95). Although the
death of Richard West may have prompted its composition, there is no
equivalent of Lycidas in the poem. Nor is there a procession of mourners, a
catalogue of flowers, or a refrain of lamentation. And, most unexpectedly,
the "Elegy" ends with the elegist imagining his own death. For Williams, the
genre of Gray's "Elegy" is not nearly as stable as the "accepted meaning" of
elegy suggests today. In the first half of the eighteenth century, she says,
the word "elegy" was an "imprecise term" in the process of becoming more
precise:
In 1712 [Joseph] Trapp wrote that "this Sort of poem was anciently, and
from its first Origin, made use of at Funerals, that therefore, of one famous
Elegiac Poet upon the death of another, of equal Fame." But Trapp goes on
to explain that the genre is not limited to this theme and situation, for
elegies often concern love as well as death. . . . Nor is the elegy necessarily
limited to expressions of sorrow, though those "full of Joy and Triumph,"
are, he believes "improperly rank'd in the Number of Elegies." The "chief
Property is to be easy and soft; to flow in one even current, and to captivate
the ear with melody." And of course when we look back to such earlier
instances of the "elegy" as those found in Donne, we recognize that we are
dealing with a highly flexible generic label, though Trapp's efforts at
definition may show that the term, like "sonnet," is in the process of
narrowing and stabilizing its accepted meaning. (Williams, p. 97)
Gray's "Elegy," Williams argues, consists of three "divergent poems"
intertwined within one another: "a graveyard meditation, a reflection upon
the universal human desire to be remembered after death, and an elegy
proper, a funeral celebration (as Trapp put it) 'on the death of one poet by
another of equal merit'" (p. 100).
The first of these three poems "is a conventional graveyard meditation on
the theme of human mortality" (p. 100). The first few stanzas, which she
entitles "Meditation Among the Tombs," give only a faint hint that the poem
is going to be a formal elegy in the tradition of "Lycidas." "The first of the
three principal sttands woven into the fabric of [Gray's] Elegy" says
Williams, "concerns the universal human fate, death" (p. 101). As numerous
commentators have pointed out, these stanzas align the poem as much with
the popular Graveyard School of descriptive-meditative poetry as with
formal elegy. "Much evidence," she says, "compels the conclusion that the
Ekgy is, fundamentally, a lyric" (p. 96), and she presents three convincing
reasons for regarding it as "closely akin" to Abrams' greater Romantic lyric:
"The establishment in the introductory stanzas of an acutely sensitive mind
recording the minute particulars, physical and expressive, of the scene
before it; the psychologically associative mode of organization throughout
the poem; a conclusion that is best understood as the completion of an
emotional rather than a narrative or logical pattern" (p. 104). The opening
stanzas are generically much more compatible with the new meditative
graveyard poem than with the conventional elegy, a fact confirmed by
Gray's original title, "Stanzas Wrote in a Country Churchyard." According to
Williams, "the second 'poem,' which one might name ? Meditation on the
Universal Human Desire for Earthly Memorials,' is corollary to the first
theme, the universality of death" (p. 102). The third poem is "more clearly
than the others a version of pastoral elegy," and it "consists of two parallel
narratives: the first celebrates the lives and deaths of the anonymous
villagers; the second, the life and death of the anonymous poet whose
epitaph concludes the poem" (p. 102).
Arnold transforms Gray's "graveyard meditation on the theme of human
mortality" (p. 100) into a meditation, amidst the Cumnor hills, on the theme
of change. For Arnold the death of Clough provides an opportunity to
meditate on the inescapability of change in human life and on how to
respond to this fate: "How changed is here each spot man makes or fills!"18
While Arnold's poem, like Gray's, does include an "elegy proper," it is also,
like Gray's, a generically mixed poem. Its title- "Thyrsis: A Monody, to
Commemorate the Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough, Who Died at
Florence, 1861"- is as misleading as Gray's, for it creates the expectation of
a pastoral elegy, an expectation it does not fulfil. Perhaps one of the reasons
that the similarities between the two poems have been overlooked is that
Gray's description of the "parting day" in the opening lines of his "Elegy" is
delayed in "Thyrsis." Although "Thyrsis" does open with "an acutely
sensitive mind recording the minute particulars, physical and expressive, of
the scene before it," it is not until half way through the poem that Arnold
evokes the same mood as the famous opening stanza of Gray's "Elegy":
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
These lines, especially the last, reverberate with the famous opening of the
"Elegy":
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Arnold later in the poem returns to his description of the approaching dusk:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Toward the end of "Thyrsis" dusk is falling, and just as it is in the opening
lines of the "Elegy," Arnold describes "the sunset, which doth glorify / The
orange and pale violet evening-sky" (11. 158-159), and his description of the
approaching eve continues:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The verbal echoes of Gray in this section of Arnold's poem are too many to
be purely coincidental, although they may very well be unconscious. Arnold
was a notoriously allusive poet, and "Thyrsis" conforms to his customary
poetic practice. Gray's curfew sounding the "knell of parting day" finds an
echo in the sound of Arnold's "cuckoo's parting cry" (1. 57); Gray's
ploughman plodding "homeward" (1. 3) parallels Arnold's fox hunters