Arnold’s ‘Resignation: to Fausta’ (1849)

Resign yourself to a very lengthy deep-dive into this lesser-known Arnold poem

What should we do when we encounter bereavement, grief and setback? Fight it? Resign ourselves? Matthew Arnold says: the latter.

Arnold’s ‘Resignation; to Fausta’ is a lengthy poem, nearly 280-lines in rhymed tetrameter couplets. It was first published in The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849), at the end of a decade that saw several upheavals in Arnold’s life. It is likely he completed it in 1847, after his younger brother Tom suddenly announced that he was going to emigrate to New Zealand, to farm the 300 acres that Thomas Arnold, their father, happened to have bought in the 1830s. Tom’s leaving was a shock to the family. At this point Arnold senior had been dead five years, and Tom saw no future for himself in England, looking to heal ‘his fractured sense of purpose’ via emigration. Matthew, brother Edward (who was then an undergraduate at Balliol) and family friend Arthur Hugh Clough saw Tom off at London docks, November 1847. Asked if he had any lingering doubts about his decision, Tom ‘said not the least’ adding ‘when I have made my mind up fully I look upon the thing as inevitable.’ Notable determination to follow-through on a decision! Tom departed and began a new life down under. He was much missed.

‘Resignation’ is addressed to Matthew Arnold’s elder sister Jane: an intelligent, rather serious woman, a Christian socialist. It was with Jane that young Arnold had the greatest affinity; they discussed literature and culture, religion and life. She read his poems and provided detailed and always honest feedback—if she didn’t like a piece, she said so. In 1847 Jane was twenty-six to Matthew’s twenty-five. But she had undergone an upheaval of her own. Five years earlier she had been engaged to be married. Here’s Ian Hamilton’s account:

Jane’s fiancé was a Rugby teacher [that is, a teacher at Jane’s father’s school] called George Cotton (the ‘Young master’ in Tom Brown’s Schooldays), a favourite of Dr Arnold’s. Cotton was by some accounts an awkward unengaging figure—noted, we note, for his monocle, with which he was ‘forever fidgeting’. ‘A more unattractive youth I never saw’ was Wordsworth’s comment. Still, he was as morally thoughtful as could be, and Jane evidently loved him. During the months of their engagement she was ‘as happy and carefree as a kitten’. The wedding would take place in June 1842 in the headmaster's Rugby garden.

In May, though, everything went wrong. Cotton suddenly cancelled the engagement, telling Dr Arnold that he ‘was not in love with Jane.’ Jane plunged into a severe depression: she could neither eat nor sleep and, when comforted, could barely bring herself to speak. Dr Arnold was appalled by her unhappiness—and was also perhaps enraged by Cotton’s conduct, though he showed the young man only ‘extreme tenderness and kindness’. On 17^th May, out walking, he suddenly collapsed: ‘a light feverish attack,’ he called it, ‘brought on by my distress and anxiety about dearest Jane.’ [Ian Hamilton, A Gift Imprisoned: the Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold (Bloomsbury 1998), 52-3]

It wasn’t a light fever, though: it was a heart attack. Thomas Arnold recovered somewhat, or at least survived, but ten days later he had a second cardiac arrest, and then a third, and he died in agony on the 12^th June. Remarkably, he expired thanking God, from his deathbed, for sending his such terrible chest pains, ‘for I have suffered so little pain in my life that I feel it is very good for me: now God has given it to me and I do so thank Him for it.’

Matthew was devastated. One can only imagine how hard the blow was for Jane, already suffering as she was. Family friend Arthur Stanley reported on Matthew’s grief:

Matthew spoke of one thing which seemed to me very natural and affecting: that the first thing that struck him when he saw the body was the thought that their sole source of information was gone, that all they had ever known was contained in that lifeless head. They had consulted him so entirely on everything, and the strange feeling of their being cut off forever one can well imagine.

When Tom considered emigration, five years later, the first thing he did was ask his brothers: what would father have thought about my decision?

Matthew probably began writing ‘Resignation’ in 1843, in the aftermath of his father’s death, and Jane’s broken engagement, but he did not complete it until 1847, prompted to return to the work by Tom’s departure. What do we do when faced with life’s adversities? When our heart is broken, we are bereaved, abandoned, cast down? Arnold says; we resign ourselves to our situation. We don’t struggle. We accept.

Do we, though?

The poem is addressed ‘to Fausta’, Arnold’s name for Jane. It’s Latin for ‘fortunate woman’ (less likely is that Arnold called Jane that as a feminine version of the name Faust: there was nothing Faustian about Jane). ‘Resignation’ is, as a poem, manifestly influenced by Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798). In that famous poem, Wordsworth addresses his sister, Dorothy, recalling a time five years previously when they had visited the titular abbey together. Wordsworth’s ode is a work celebrating the love-connection between brother and sister, and the harmonizing power of Nature, the sense of a world deeply interfused with the divine. ‘Resignation’, though a poem in which a brother addresses a beloved sister, recalling a time years before (10 years, in Arnold’s piece) when they had walked through the natural world together (in Arnold’s poem, the Lake district—specifically a walk from Wythburn to Keswick in 1833) has a rather different tone to Wordsworth’s. The original walk was with Thomas Arnold and other family-members. A decade later Matthew and Jane retrace their steps, just the two of them.

The solemn wastes of heathy hill
Sleep in the July sunshine still;
The self-same shadows now, as then,
Play through this grassy upland glen;
The loose dark stones on the green way
Lie strewn, it seems, where then they lay;
On this mild bank above the stream
(You crush them!) the blue gentians gleam.
Still this wild brook, the rushes cool,
The sailing foam, the shining pool!
These are not changed; and we, you say,
Are scarce more changed, in truth, than they.

The poem urges its title quantity upon its addressee: Jane should renounce, should rise above ‘the conflicting tumult of the passions’. She should, says the poem, be like ‘the poet’ who, though ‘tears/are in his eyes’ contemplates the continuity and unity of nature: ‘he does not say I am alone’.

He sees the gentle stir of birth
When morning purifies the earth;
He leans upon a gate and sees
The pasture and the quiet trees,
Before him he sees life unroll,
A placid and continuous whole—
That general life, which does not cease,
Whose secret is not joy, but peace;
That life, whose dumb wish is not missed
If birth proceeds, if things subsist;
The life of plants, and stones, and rain,
The life he craves—if not in vain
Fate gave, what chance shall not control,
His sad lucidity of soul.

Not joy but peace. This is a poem that says: happiness is more than we can expect, but if we resign ourselves to our unhappiness, then we can find peace.

J Hillis Miller thinks ‘Resignation’ a ‘spiritual failure’.

Arnold has no sense of a harmonizing power in nature, nor can he express the Coleridgean sense that each object, though unique, is at the same time a symbol of the totality. The closest Arnold can come to the multi-dimensional symbolism of Romantic poetry is the simple equation of allegory, in which some human meaning or value is attached from the outside to a natural object. This produces locutions in which a concrete thing and an abstraction are yoked by violence together, as in the ‘sea of life’, the ‘Sea of Faith’, the ‘vasty halls of death’, the ‘icebergs of the past’ and so on. Try as he will Arnold cannot often get depth and resonance to his landscapes, and his descriptive passages tend to become unorganized lists of natural objects. The disorder and flatness of these lists betray Arnold’s sense that nature is just a collection of discrete things, all jumbled up together, with no pattern or hierarchy. [Miller, The Disappearance of God (Harvard Univ Press 1963), ch 5]

Miller then cites the passage beginning ‘The solemn wastes of heathy hill…’ (quoted above), complaining that ‘hill, shadows, gentians, brook, rushes, foam, pool—the scene is a collection of the elements which happen by accident to be there, ‘strewn’ about like the haphazard stones which lie in the centre of the picture.’ In Miller’s reading ‘there is no transfiguration of a revisited scene, as in “Tintern Abbey”.’

This seems unfair. ‘Tintern Abbey’ is a poem about joy, harmony, connection; ‘Resignation’ is a poem about how to deal with grief, abandonment, despair and misery. These are different things. We would not expect Arnold’s poem to promote a transfigured harmony in the natural world, in the teeth of his bereavement and familial disconnection.

To go through ‘Resignation’ is to be struck by a couple of things. First, it starts with a couplet that, it seems, has little bearing on what follows:

To die be given us, or attain!
Fierce work it were, to do again.

I suspect this is Arnold’s version of the Latin motto aut vincere, aut mori: the Duke of Kent’s motto.

The full Latin phrase is aut vincere aut mori: non dabatur tertium—attain our victory or die, there is no third way, which is more or less the couplet with which Arnold starts his poem. Why the Duke of Kent? Perhaps because he was the father of Queen Victoria, and had died in 1820 (the title was discontinued on his death, although it was resurrected as a royal earldom in 1866, and as today’s dukedom in 1934). Perhaps the parallel, Victoria bereaved of a notable (military commander) father; Arnold and Jane, bereaved of a notable (headmaster and writer) father.

In terms of the poem, these lines—‘ To die be given us, or attain!/Fierce work it were, to do again’—are presented as a prayer offered up by ‘pilgrims, bound for Mecca’ in the heat of a ‘burning noon’; but also as the prayer of certain crusaders, ‘warriors/scarfed with the cross’, watching the train of pilgrims crossing the desert, ‘the miles/of dust which wreathed their struggling files’. Are the crusaders, looking down at the column of Mecca-bound pilgrims from on high (they are upon ‘Lydian mountains’) about to charge down and kill them all? It seems so, because Arnold identifies two other groups who utter the same ‘do or die, for we cannot re-do’ prayer: ‘the Goth, bound Rome-wards’ to sack the city, and Atilla’s horde ‘the Hun,/Crouched on his saddle’ as the sun sets over the Danube, casting ‘lurid’ light ‘o’er flooded plains’, the groaning river pouring its flow into the ‘drear Euxine’. And then the extrapolation:

so pray all,
Whom labours, self-ordained, inthrall;
Because they to themselves propose
On this side the all-common close
A goal which, gained, may give repose.
So pray they; and to stand again
Where they stood once, to them were pain;
Pain to thread back and to renew
Past straits, and currents long steered through.

But wait: how does this example work? There are lots of people who are engaged on onerous labours and hope they won’t have to re-do them, but who aren’t set on killing, sacking or conquering. The four examples—a religious pilgrimage, a religious war, attacking a city and conquering territory—make for a strange keynote to a poem that is going on to talk about a middle-class brother and sister dealing with bereavement, and walking through the English countryside.

The mildness of the latter instance is the contrast to which Arnold moves. One type of person aims to achieve ‘repose’ by doing—or dying in the attempt—such that their victory will bring them peace. But, says Arnold, there is another way to repose: simply accept where you are. ‘Milder natures’ (in fact the poem is saying: milder than Atilla the Hun, which is, we might think, a pretty low bar) are ‘more free’ than these Haj-pilgrims, crusaders, Goths and Huns. For them

an unblamed serenity
Hath freed from passions, and the state
Of struggle these necessitate;
Whom schooling of the stubborn mind
Hath made, or birth hath found, resigned,—
These mourn not, that their goings pay
Obedience to the passing day. [23-9]

Two ways to resignation, then: either you ‘school’ your ‘stubborn mind’ to accept things as they are; or you are born that way, with a temperament that finds resignation easy. And once you achieve resignation, you leave mourning behind. It no longer upsets you that you will pass away and die, or that others have passed on.

This is the first portion of the poem. At line 40 Arnold, addressing his sister, recalls to her the walk they took together, itself echoing their earlier walk, when they were part of the larger party that included their now dead father:

We left just ten years since, you say,
That wayside inn we left to-day.

Arnold added a note to 1853: ‘those who have been long familiar with the English Lake Country will find no difficulty in recalling, from the description in the text, the roadside inn at Wythburn, on the descent from Dunmail Raise towards Keswick; its sedentary landlord of thirty years ago; and the passage over the Wythburn Fells to Watendlath.’ A long way from parching Lydian deserts, or dreary Danubian plains. And off they go:

A gate swings to! our tide hath flowed
Already from the silent road.
The valley-pastures, one by one,
Are threaded, quiet in the sun;
And now, beyond the rude stone bridge,
Slopes gracious up the western ridge.
Its woody border, and the last
Of its dark upland farms, is past;
Cool farms, with open-lying stores,
Under their burnished sycamores,—
All past! and through the trees we glide
Emerging on the green hillside.
There climbing hangs, a far-seen sign,
Our wavering, many-coloured line;
There winds, up-streaming slowly still
Over the summit of the hill.
And now, in front, behold outspread
Those upper regions we must tread,—
Mild hollows, and clear heathy swells,
The cheerful silence of the fells.

This is the ten-years-ago walk, not the one Matthew and Jane took together ‘today’. On that latter walk it’s just Matthew and Jane: in the earlier walk we see the ‘tide’ of people, the ‘many coloured line’ of walkers making their way up the hill, all the Arnolds, including father Thomas, together with other friends. The relationship between this secular pilgrimage and the Haj-pilgrims with which the poem opens is not obvious: nor the identity of the crusaders about to gallop down out of the hills and attack them—unless the implication is that Dr Arnold’s death, Jane being jilted by her fiancé, are in some sense allegorised by these pitiless Christian soldiers. But that would be a strange kind of parallel. Still, contra Miller, this passage strikes me as fine, harmonious nature writing: the road ‘threading’ the quiet sunlit fields, passing over the bridge and up the ‘green hillside’, fringed by forest and swells of heath. ‘Burnished sycamore’ is vivid, and precisely observed, and the ‘many-coloured line’ of walkers, single-file, all in their various clothes and coats, ‘stream upwards’, reversing the flow of natural bourns and rivers. The ‘upper regions’ are the literal summits of the Keswick heights, but they also anticipate the journey of life into death and the ascent to the higher realm. The silence of the tomb is, here, a ‘cheerful silence’. The party reaches the top and comes down the far side, to see—as with the gorgeous ending of ‘Sohrab and Rustum’ (1853)—the beauty of a shimmering evening sea.

Some two hours’ march, with serious air,
Through the deep noontide heats we fare;
The red-grouse, springing at our sound,
Skims, now and then, the shining ground;
Oh, joy! again the farms appear.
Cool shade is there, and rustic cheer;
There springs the brook will guide us down,
Bright comrade, to the noisy town.
Lingering, we follow down; we gain
The town, the highway, and the plain.
And many a mile of dusty way,
Parched and road-worn, we made that day;
But, Fausta, I remember well,
That as the balmy darkness fell,
We bathed our hands with speechless glee,
That night, in the wide-glimmering sea. [68-85]

Ten years later, their father dead, the party dispersed, Matthew and Jane retrace this walk. But now they come as ghosts of the former vitality.

Once more we tread this self-same road,
Fausta, which ten years since we trod;
Alone we tread it, you and I,
Ghosts of that boisterous company.
Here, where the brook shines, near its head,
In its clear, shallow, turf-fringed bed;
Here, whence the eye first sees, far down,
Capped with faint smoke, the noisy town,—
Here sit we, and again unroll,
Though slowly, the familiar whole.

They see, from their eminence, a group of gypsies, perhaps recalling the opening lines, in which the crusaders looks down upon a column of Haj-pilgrims.

The gypsies, whom we met below,
They too have long roamed to and fro;
They ramble, leaving, where they pass,
Their fragments on the cumbered grass.
And often to some kindly place
Chance guides the migratory race,
Where, though long wanderings intervene,
They recognize a former scene.
The dingy tents are pitched; the fires
Give to the wind their wavering spires;
In dark knots crouch round the wild flame
Their children, as when first they came.

Arnold returns to gypsies in ‘The Scholar Gypsy’ (1853), one of his most celebrated poems. But what are they doing in this poem? Time afflicts them, Arnold says, but they are resigned to it. They are surrounded by ‘signs’ that might prompt them to unhappy reflection, to disaffection, ‘disquietude’; but with an innate wisdom they ignore those signs.

Signs are not wanting, which might raise
The ghost in them of former days,—
Signs are not wanting, if they would;
Suggestions to disquietude.
For them, for all, time’s busy touch,
While it mends little, troubles much.
Their joints grow stiffer—but the year
Runs his old round of dubious cheer;
Chilly they grow—yet winds in March,
Still, sharp as ever, freeze and parch;
They must live still—and yet, God knows,
Crowded and keen the country grows;
It seems as if, in their decay,
The law grew stronger every day.
So might they reason, so compare,
Fausta, times past with times that are;
But no! they rubbed through yesterday
In their hereditary way,
And they will rub through, if they can,
To-morrow on the self-same plan,
Till death arrive to supersede,
For them, vicissitude and need.

This, the poem is telling us, is the best way to be. Resign yourself to suffering; rub-through tomorrow as you rubbed-through yesterday and so go on, until you eventually die. It’s not the jolliest philosophy of life.

This brings us to the end of the second ‘section’, broadly defined, of the poem (lines 40-144): first the prelude, with the Haj-pilgrims, crusaders, Goths and Huns, and their respective ‘do or die! No second time!’ philosophy; then the experience of Matthew and Jane walking the Lakes, remembering happier days with their now-dead father and Matthew, upon seeing the gypsies and their ‘renounced’ being-in-the-world, recommending such to his sister. The final remaining long section (lines 145-278) turns to poetry. Arnold kicks off with:

The poet, to whose mighty heart
Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart,
Subdues that energy to scan
Not his own course, but that of man.

Poets are hieratic figures for this poem: sacred observers of life. ‘Though he [the poet] move mountains,’ Arnold says, invoking Pauline religious faith, though he lives in the broad, sunlit uplands, or what Arnold calls ‘the proud heights of sway’, though his verse has freed slaves (‘though he hath loosed a thousand chains’), and though the poet himself has endured unimaginable agonies (‘he hath borne immortal pains/Action and suffering’)—none of this is enough: ‘he hath not lived, if he lives so.’ St Paul says that it’s not enough to have faith enough to move mountains, you also need love. St Arnold says: it’s not enough to have poetry enough to move mountains, you also need a properly resigned perspective de haut en bas, of human existence:

From some high station he looks down,
At sunset, on a populous town;
Surveys each happy group which fleets,
Toil ended, through the shining streets,—
Each with some errand of its own,—
And does not say, I am alone.

Like the crusaders looking down upon the Haj-pilgrims with which the poem opens, or Matthew and Jane looking down from Keswick heights upon the coastal town, the poet observes the busy-ness of life below him. His conclusion is: that he is not solitary.

He sees the gentle stir of birth
When morning purifies the earth;
He leans upon a gate, and sees
The pastures, and the quiet trees.
Low, woody hill, with gracious bound,
Folds the still valley almost round;
The cuckoo, loud on some high lawn,
Is answered from the depth of dawn;
In the hedge straggling to the stream,
Pale, dew-drenched, half-shut roses gleam.
But, where the farther side slopes down,
He sees the drowsy new-waked clown [that is, rural worker]
In his white quaint-embroidered frock
Make, whistling, toward his mist-wreathed flock,
Slowly, behind his heavy tread,
The wet, flowered grass heaves up its head.

What effect does seeing this vista have upon the poet? The answer is that it, like an onion, makes him cry. Why? Because he sees in it a continuum with the millennia of prior human existence.

Leaned on his gate, he gazes: tears
Are in his eyes, and in his ears
The murmur of a thousand years.
Before him he sees life unroll,
A placid and continuous whole,—
That general life, which does not cease,
Whose secret is not joy, but peace.

Is the poet Arnold? Arnold is a poet, and indeed is the poet writing this poem, and therefore writing this poet. But that may not mean that this poet, referred-to here, is Arnold. He is perhaps an ideal poet, the poet Arnold wished he was. At any rate the poet weeps as he looks down upon ‘general life’ going about its business. Why is he sobbing? Is he moved by the suffering of others? Or is he weeping that he does not have access to their secret, ‘not joy, but peace’?

At this point the poem once again addresses Jane directly, ‘Fausta’. She, it turns out, is unpersuaded by what he has been saying, and replies in italics, which is always the best way to reply, I feel.

You listen; but that wandering smile,
Fausta, betrays you cold the while!
Your eyes pursue the bells of foam
Washed, eddying, from this bank, their home.
Those gypsies—so your thoughts I scan—
Are less, the poet more, than man.
They feel not, though they move and see.
Deeper the poet feels; but he
Breathes, when he will, immortal air,
Where Orpheus and where Homer are.
In the day’s life, whose iron round
Hems us all in, he is not bound;
He leaves his kind, o’erleaps their pen,
And flees the common life of men.
He escapes thence, but we abide.
Not deep the poet sees, but wide.

‘Pen’ is a pun, meaning both the walls that constrain animals in a certain space, and the means by which a poet writes out his poem. So the gypsies, living their unexamined, subsistence life, are ‘less’ than the average man; closer to the animals, they ‘feel not’. The poet, invoked previously, is ‘more’ than the average man, and ‘feels’ more deeply. He is not constrained by the ‘iron round’ of ordinary life that binds the rest of us; instead he leaps over the side of our prison-stockade and ‘flees the life of common men’, escaping to orphic song and Homeric poetry, the ‘immortal air’ of poetry. We, however, are stuck here. I suppose not deep the poet sees, but wide means: the poet sees a lot of things, but in a shallow way; he lacks true insight into the nature of things. It’s a little awkwardly phrased, though. If Arnold had reversed the order of width and depth, as it might be—

But from Parnassian em’nence steep
The poet widely sees, not deep.

—it would be clearer that Fausta was criticising the poet for his lack of insight. But by concluding the line with the rhymed ‘wide’ the poem implies that it is a good thing to see without depth; that width is to be preferred. Wait, though: which is better? A broad shallow vision? A narrow, deep one? Arnold responds to his sister:

The world in which we live and move
Outlasts aversion, outlasts love,
Outlasts each effort, interest, hope,
Remorse, grief, joy; and, were the scope
Of these affections wider made,
Man still would see, and see dismayed,
Beyond his passion’s widest range,
Far regions of eternal change.
Nay, and since death, which wipes out man,
Finds him with many an unsolved plan,
With much unknown, and much untried,
Wonder not dead, and thirst not dried,
Still gazing on the ever full
Eternal mundane spectacle,—
This world in which we draw our breath,
In some sense, Fausta, outlasts death. [215-30]

We might respond: of course the world outlasts our death, in the sense that we die but the world continues. But this banality may not be what that line means. Perhaps by ‘world’ Arnold means not the external universe, but the plans, the sense of wonder, the thirst of men and women.

Enough, we live! and if a life
With large results so little rife,
Though bearable, seem hardly worth
This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth;
Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread,
The solemn hills around us spread,
This stream which falls incessantly,
The strange-scrawled rocks, the lonely sky,
If I might lend their life a voice,
Seem to bear rather than rejoice.
And even could the intemperate prayer
Man iterates, while these forbear,
For movement, for an ampler sphere,
Pierce Fate’s impenetrable ear;
Not milder is the general lot
Because our spirits have forgot,
In action’s dizzying eddy whirled,
The something that infects the world.

That’s the note no which the poem ends. But what does it mean to say that our spirits have forgotten ‘the something that infects the world’? Infects in what sense? Like a disease, a pathogen? For Alan Glob, Arnold here is anticipating Schopenhauer (not replicating, or engaging with him, since in the 1840s he hadn’t read any of the German pessimist’s work, and probably hadn’t even heard of him; but rather, articulating a conceptual consonance).

One of the most philosophically trenchant account of the great paradigm shift that has carried us from Romanticism to that post-Romanticism we usually think of as modernism, Northrop Frye has represented it as a change in world-views in which ‘the noumenal world of Fichte turns into the sinister world-as-will of Schopenhauer.’ … in the earlier “noumenal world of Fichte,” the noumenal will and the human will in its worthiest or sometimes just in its most intense manifestations are understood, at bottom, to be aligned and alike, at one in aim and presumably in essence. In poets like Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley, and still later in Browning and Tennyson, some privileged aspect of the human psyche—sometimes the poetic imagination, sometimes the passions or even the sexual drives—is seen as finally impelled by, identical with, and the expression of larger cosmic forces that might, in fact, never realize their noumenal ends without the actualizing strivings of the cooperating human will. With the fateful emergence of ‘the sinister world-as-will of Schopenhauer,’ this basic relationship is drastically reconstituted, so that now noumena and phenomena, the metaphysical will and human consciousness, are perceived as wholly estranged and antithetical. Every activity of the life of consciousness, and especially its intentional activity, is understood to be mere accident, epiphenomena, a cosmic irrelevancy. Now the metaphysically alienated human psyche finds itself at variance with and in danger of being overwhelmed by the ‘blind impulse’ of a greater cosmic will …

Of the nineteenth-century poets generally considered major, only Arnold has truly undergone this momentous and decisive philosophic change and works entirely within the pessimistic framework of the Schopenhauerian paradigm, assuming as axiomatic and inarguable a wholly antithetical relationship between human consciousness and the metaphysical agency that is the ground of all being. Arnold alone among his major poetic contemporaries can be numbered in that post-Fichtean and post-Romantic intellectual vanguard … And of the poems of Arnold none is more obviously and centrally of that vanguard than ‘Resignation.’ Philosophically explicit and ambitious, ‘Resignation’ is certainly the first and perhaps the fullest exposition of metaphysical pessimism in nineteenth century English poetry, probably the only substantial poem of the age to express truly this special and indispensable moment in that intellectual process Arnold knew to be ‘the main line of modern development.’ ‘Resignation’ gives us the Schopenhauerian paradigm at its bleakest, an unfalteringly comfortless account of human endeavor in a world fatally flawed by the determining agency of the utterly pervasive ‘something that infects’ it. [Alan Grob, ‘The Poetry of Pessimism: Arnold's “Resignation”’ Victorian Poetry, 26:1/2 (1988), 25-6]

I’m not sure this is right. Arnold, though assuredly a poet of doubt and grief, of self-uncertainty and time-out-of-jointedness, was not really Schopenhaeurian. Nor does ‘infect’ articulate a Schopenhaeurian metaphysics:—for him it is not that the universe is, as it were, a hale, handsome body that has become infected with some nasty virus; the universe is the virus: a hungry will that devours itself is the ground of everything, not some pathologically adventitious infection of it. Will is behind all the ‘representations’ that manifest as the epiphenomena of the world.

I’m not suggesting that ‘Resignation’ is a cheery-happy poem. Obviously it is not. It is a reaction to pain, to grief and suffering, and an argument that we must resign ourselves to such things, to find ‘not joy but peace’.

But consider ‘the something that infects the world’. Infect derives, etymologically, from the Latin īnficiō (the English word comes from the supine form, infectum), which originally meant ‘to dip, to dunk, to submerge’. This, we could say, is its original meaning: a version in- (“in” “into”) +‎ faciō (“to perform, do”). An immersive baptism would be infectum, John the Baptist was an infector; we infect ourselves when we bathe or swim. A secondary meaning of the Latin was ‘to color, to dye, to imbue, to stain, to tinge’, since a dyer immerses what they are dyeing in the coloured medium. From this second meaning a third developed, from ‘stain’, meaning ‘to corrupt, to poison, to spoil, to taint, to infect’, and this is how the word has come into meaning in English. But I wonder if Arnold has the earlier meaning of the word somewhere in mind: there is something that immerses the world—as Arnold and Jane immersed their hands in the gleaming ocean at the end of their ten-years-previous walk. Still: Arnold doesn’t write ‘baptises the world’; he writes infects, and that’s a term that carries negative implications. Or perhaps the ambiguity is the point: ‘in old age,’ T J Clark once wrote, ‘acceptance of the world and abhorrence at it often keep company.’ This is young Matthew Arnold, still in his 20s, pretending to be Old Matthew Arnold, looking backwards over a life already lived, cosplaying (we might say) an end-of-life wisdom, hard earned—in fact, Matthew Arnold never got to be Old Matthew Arnold, dying of a heart attack in 1888, running for a tram.

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In for a penny, in for a pound: resign yourself to this post going on even longer. Much longer!

Not joy, says the poem, but peace. The opening slogan—aut vincere aut mori: non dabatur tertium—leads to the joy of victory (or else to extinction): fight, it says. Do not go gentle into that good night. But Arnold starts the poem with this sentiment in order to counter it: not joy, but acceptance, resignation, and so peace.

Is it right that ‘resignation’ is the best approach to a life of suffering and loss? To resign oneself to the world might be a Stoic orientation of one’s being-in-the-world with the inevitable. But to resign might be: to give up, to surrender, to throw up one’s hands, to abdicate. To refuse the good fight, to lie down and turn to face the wall. That’s not a valid or creditable thing.

The Greek is παραίτηση, which can mean either ‘resignation’ in the former sense, or ‘abdication’ in the latter. Here it is in the New Testament: Hebrews 12:25.

βλέπετε μὴ παραιτήσησθε τὸν λαλοῦντα. εἰ γὰρ ἐκεῖνοι οὐκ ἔφυγον, τὸν ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς παραιτησάμενοι χρηματίζοντα, πολλῷ μᾶλλον ἡμεῖς οἱ τὸν ἀπ’ οὐρανῶν ἀποστρεφόμενοι·

See that you do not refuse Him who speaks. For if they did not escape who refused Him who spoke on earth, much more shall we not escape if we turn away from Him who speaks from heaven,

This is clear: βλέπετε μὴ παραιτήσησθε, “See that you do not resign, do not abdicate your responsibilities to God.” In Latin, ‘resignation’ can be renunciato, or abdicato. The latter means, literally, to step away from speaking (ab + dictato)—a contradictory thing for a poet, speaking his poem, to propose. Truly to resign would be: not to write a poem about the merits of resignation. It would be to live in the moment, like the gypsies. But that is manifestly not what Arnold is doing. On the contrary, he is supplying a voice for the ‘mute’ natural world, whose rocks are ‘strange-scrawled’, as if with hieroglyphs of immense meaning that only need interpreting:

Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread,
The solemn hills around us spread,
This stream which falls incessantly,
The strange-scrawled rocks, the lonely sky—
If I might lend their life a voice,
Seem to bear rather than rejoice.
And even could the intemperate prayer
Man iterates, while these forbear,
For movement, for an ampler sphere,
Pierce Fate’s impenetrable ear.

The shift from bear to forbear in two lines—the natural world bearing existence, in the sense of passively enduring it, humans forbearing it, in the sense of avoiding, abstaining, abdicating—is the heart of the matter. That inner-and-line-ending triple rhyme bear/prayer/forebear, and the follow-up couplet with its near homophomic sphere/ear rhyme, drive this home. Resignation is the placid bearing of the nature of things; but it is also a forbearing. The natural world, mute, solemn, unrejoicing, is accepting; but it is also lonely, also trying to communicate something, via some strange scrawl, despite its muteness.

We could say that it is a matter of specificity. Perhaps the poem is saying: resignation is the best way in certain circumstances, but not necessarily in all. When your father dies, accept it, because fighting it, struggling with the fact of it, won’t do you any good. Death is not a reality amenable to negotiation, and will not respect your defiance. When your lover abandons you, accept it: don’t try to persuade them back. This, it seems to me, is more gendered. When your brother quits the country and goes to live the other side of the world—where you will never see him again—accept it. But wait: Jane didn’t give up, when her fiancé jilted her: didn’t resign herself to spinsterhood and misery. In 1850 she married William Edward Forster, industrialist, philanthropist and Liberal Party statesman, what was by all accounts a very happy union. And in countless situations, simply giving up—forbearing, resigning—would be a cowardly passivity. Your brother leaves the country? You can stay in touch with him! Visit: encourage him to visit you. If you are knocked down, don’t lie there, saying ‘I am resigned to my new position, prone in the gutter’—get up! If you are Thomas Carlyle, and have learned that John Stuart Mill’s maidservant has accidentally burned your one and only copy of The French Revolution, don’t say ‘I am resigned to this calamity: the book is gone forever’. Resolve to write the whole thing out again from scratch.

You might say that I’m being nitpicky. Arnold isn’t saying: ‘when adversity strikes, give up—abdicate.’ There is an unspoken particularity at the heart of the poem: not adversity as such, but death. It’s death that infects the world: mortality that stains existence. George Canning (who served as Prime Minister towards the end of his life o 1827) had four children, the oldest of whom, George Charles Canning (1801–1820), died from consumption—a horrible death. Canning wrote the following elegy:

Though short thy span, God's unimpeach'd decrees,
Which made that shorten'd span one long disease,
Yet merciful in chastening, gave thee scope
For mild, redeeming virtues, Faith and Hope;
Meek Resignation; pious Charity
And, since this world was not the world for thee,
Far from thy path removed, with partial care,
Strife, Glory, Gain, and Pleasure's flowery snare,
Bade Earth's temptations pass thee harmless by,
And fix'd on Heaven thine unadverted eye!
Oh! mark'd from birth, and nurtur'd for the skies!
In youth, with more than learning's wisdom, wise!
As sainted martyrs, patient to endure!
Simple as unweari'd infancy and pure!
Pure from all stain (save that of human clay,
Which Christ's atoning blood hath wash'd away!)
By mortal sufferings now no more oppress'd,
Mount sinless Spirit, to thy destined rest!
While I—reversed our nature's kindlier doom
Pour forth a father's sorrows on thy tomb.

Here resignation is what young George, literally coughing his lungs his pieces, accessed: but it’s also what George Senior is, in this poem, urging on himself, along with those other virtues.