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Four Victorian Poets
that they have the force of facts. What can better words like these—
So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry,
From the wet field, through the vext garden trees,
Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze:
From the wet field, through the vext garden trees,
Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze:
or these from Dover Beach—
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
When the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
When the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
This, as accurate as it is poetical, is finer but not truer—with "its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar"—than Tennyson's verse, describing the same thing—
The scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the wave.
At least, it enables Arnold to make a more human use of the natural fact than Tennyson could have done. Tennyson's phrase makes the sea and the stones of the beach be and feel like men, and, having done so, he cannot use them as illustrating the large movement of human life. But Arnold seeing and hearing them as pure nature, not humanised nature, transfers the scene
