The Voice

Matthew Arnold's The Voice

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), a distinguished Victorian poet, critic, and educational reformer, produced a body of work that vividly captures the intellectual and spiritual anxiety of nineteenth-century England. Amid the rapid social changes brought about by industrialization, scientific advancement, and religious doubt, Arnold's poetry often explores themes of isolation, loss of faith, and nostalgic yearning for certainty. "The Voice," though less frequently studied than Arnold's more celebrated poems like "Dover Beach" or "The Scholar-Gipsy," represents a profound meditation on memory, grief, and the lingering power of the past over the present consciousness. This analysis will explore the poem's complex structure, its rich tapestry of imagery, its thematic preoccupations, and its place within Arnold's broader poetic project and the Victorian literary landscape.

Historical and Biographical Context

To appreciate "The Voice" fully, we must situate it within the context of Arnold's life and the broader cultural milieu of Victorian England. Composed during a period of profound transition in British intellectual and spiritual life, the poem reflects the tension between traditional beliefs and emerging modern doubt that characterized the era. The Victorian period witnessed unprecedented scientific discoveries, including Darwin's evolutionary theory, which challenged conventional religious narratives. This precipitated what many scholars have termed a "crisis of faith"—a widespread questioning of religious certainties that had previously anchored British society.

Arnold himself embodied this crisis. Raised in a household that valued both religious devotion and intellectual inquiry (his father, Thomas Arnold, was the famous headmaster of Rugby School and a religious reformer), Matthew Arnold developed a complex relationship with faith. While he acknowledged the psychological and cultural importance of Christianity, he struggled to accept its supernatural elements. This tension between yearning for spiritual consolation and rational skepticism permeates much of his poetry, including "The Voice."

Beyond religious concerns, Arnold was deeply troubled by what he perceived as the cultural and spiritual impoverishment of industrial Britain. In his critical works, he lamented the nation's excessive materialism and utilitarian thinking at the expense of "sweetness and light"—his term for beauty and intellectual enlightenment. "The Voice," with its images of ruins, desolation, and loss, can be read as expressing this broader cultural lament.

On a more personal level, biographical readings of the poem have suggested connections to Arnold's relationship with Marguerite, a woman he apparently met during travels in Switzerland in the 1840s. Several poems in Arnold's "Switzerland" sequence address this mysterious figure, and some scholars have speculated that the "unforgotten voice" in this poem might refer to her. However, as with many poetic works, reducing "The Voice" solely to autobiographical experience would diminish its artistic complexity and universal resonance.

Structural and Formal Analysis

"The Voice" exhibits a fascinating formal structure that underscores its thematic concerns. The poem begins with three extended similes, each growing increasingly complex, before culminating in the direct address to the "unforgotten voice" in the final stanzas. This progressive structure—moving from comparative illustrations to the emotional core—creates a sense of emotional intensification that mirrors the speaker's growing psychological distress.

The poem's irregular stanza lengths and varied metrical patterns create a sense of formal restlessness that echoes its thematic preoccupation with disturbance and unease. The opening stanzas employ shorter lines and relatively simple rhyme patterns, but as the poem progresses, both line length and metrical complexity increase. This formal evolution mirrors the poem's movement from external natural imagery toward the more chaotic interior landscape of memory and emotion.

Particularly notable is Arnold's use of repetition and parallelism throughout the poem. The anaphoric structure of the opening sections ("As the kindling glances," "As the tears of sorrow") establishes a rhythmic pattern that gives way to more fragmented, emotionally charged language in the poem's latter half. The repetition of "in vain" and the accumulation of adverbs in phrases like "anxiously and painfully" and "drearily and doubtfully" create a sense of overwhelming emotion that the formal structure can barely contain.

The poem's punctuation—particularly its abundant use of dashes, exclamation points, and commas—further contributes to its emotional intensity. These punctuation marks create brief pauses and shifts in tone that suggest a speaker struggling to articulate overwhelming feelings. The effect is one of emotional authenticity rather than polished rhetorical performance—the voice of a speaker genuinely grappling with powerful psychological experiences.

Imagery and Symbolism

"The Voice" displays Arnold's mastery of natural imagery, deploying a series of carefully constructed vignettes that function as both literal descriptions and symbolic representations of psychological states. The poem opens with the image of moonlight on water:

As the kindling glances,
Queen-like and clear,
Which the bright moon lances
From her tranquil sphere
At the sleepless waters
Of a lonely mere,
On the wild whirling waves, mournfully, mournfully,
Shiver and die

This initial tableau establishes several key symbolic patterns. The contrast between the tranquil moon and the "wild whirling waves" suggests the tension between calm reason and emotional turbulence that pervades the poem. The description of waters as "sleepless" subtly anthropomorphizes nature, projecting human restlessness onto the landscape—a classic Victorian technique that anticipates the pathetic fallacy of later poetry. The moonlight that "shivers and dies" upon the waves becomes a powerful metaphor for ephemeral beauty and failed communication—themes that resonate throughout the poem.

The second extended simile moves from natural to human imagery:

As the tears of sorrow
Mothers have shed—
Prayers that to-morrow
Shall in vain be sped
When the flower they flow for
Lies frozen and dead—
Fall on the throbbing brow, fall on the burning breast,
Bringing no rest

Here, Arnold introduces the poem's central concern with futility and loss. The mothers' tears—shed for a child metaphorically rendered as a "flower... frozen and dead"—bring "no rest" despite their intensity. This image of ineffectual grief establishes the emotional terrain of the poem: a landscape of powerful feeling that cannot change reality or restore what has been lost.

The third simile sequence introduces architectural imagery alongside natural elements:

Like bright waves that fall
With a lifelike motion
On the lifeless margin of the sparkling ocean;
A wild rose climbing up a mouldering wall;
A gush of sunbeams through a ruined hall

These images share a common pattern: vital, animate forces (waves with "lifelike motion," a climbing rose, sunbeams) encountering lifeless, decaying structures (the "lifeless margin," a "mouldering wall," a "ruined hall"). This juxtaposition of vitality and decay suggests the speaker's confrontation with mortality and loss. The architectural ruins specifically evoke a sense of historical decline that resonates with Arnold's broader cultural criticism regarding Victorian society's spiritual decay.

The final image in this sequence—"Strains of glad music at a funeral"—brings together the poem's preoccupation with incongruity and emotional dissonance. Like all the preceding images, it depicts something beautiful and vital (music) in a context of death and sorrow (a funeral). This unsettling juxtaposition perfectly captures the disorienting emotional experience at the poem's core: the return of a beloved voice from the past into a present defined by its absence.

Thematic Analysis

Memory and Temporal Dislocation

Central to "The Voice" is the theme of memory's power to disrupt temporal boundaries. The poem dramatizes how a remembered voice can suddenly collapse the distance between past and present, creating what the speaker calls "such intolerable change / Of thought, such contrast strange." This temporal dislocation—the intrusion of the past into the present—creates profound psychological disturbance.

Arnold portrays memory not as a comforting connection to the past but as a disruptive force that undermines the speaker's hard-won emotional equilibrium. The voice returns "Like wanderers from the world's extremity, / Unto their ancient home," suggesting both the distance the speaker has traveled from the past and the inevitable return of what has been repressed. This portrayal of memory aligns with what Freud would later theorize as the "return of the repressed"—the way that emotional experiences that have been pushed from conscious awareness nevertheless resurface, often with disturbing intensity.

The Failure of Communication

Despite the poem's title, "The Voice" largely concerns itself with the failure of voices to effect change or provide comfort. The moonlight "shivers and dies" on the waves; the mothers' prayers are "in vain"; and most dramatically, the remembered voice that "Did steal into mine ear" and "Blew such a thrilling summons to my will" nevertheless "could not shake it" and "could not break it." This pattern suggests a profound skepticism about the efficacy of language and emotional expression—a skepticism characteristic of Arnold's work more broadly.

This theme reflects the Victorian crisis of communication, as traditional religious and social discourses lost their authority in an increasingly secular, pluralistic society. Arnold's critical works frequently address this crisis, advocating for a revitalized cultural discourse that could provide meaning in an age of doubt. "The Voice" dramatizes this crisis on a personal level, showing how even the most emotionally powerful communications may fail to bridge the gaps between individuals or between past and present selves.

The Duality of Desire and Resistance

The poem's conclusion reveals a complex psychological dynamic: the speaker simultaneously yearns for and resists the remembered voice. The voice blew "such a thrilling summons to my will, / Yet could not shake it; / Made my tost heart its very life-blood spill, / Yet could not break it." This paradoxical response—intense emotional reaction ("life-blood spill") coupled with stubborn resistance—suggests an ambivalence toward the past that the voice represents.

Several interpretations of this ambivalence are possible. The speaker might be protecting himself from renewed grief by resisting the voice's appeal. Alternatively, the resistance might represent a commitment to present reality over past attachment. In either case, the poem portrays psychological life as a site of conflict between opposing desires—a portrayal that anticipates modern psychological understandings of the divided self.

Spiritual Crisis and the Search for Meaning

While not explicitly religious, "The Voice" engages with the spiritual crisis that characterized Victorian intellectual life. The images of ruins, futile prayers, and desolate landscapes evoke the sense of a world emptied of transcendent meaning. The voice that returns from "the world's extremity" suggests something like a spiritual visitation, yet its effect is disturbance rather than consolation.

This ambiguous treatment of spiritual experience reflects Arnold's complex relationship with religion. Neither embracing traditional faith nor rejecting spiritual yearning entirely, "The Voice" occupies the uncertain middle ground that Arnold described in his famous phrase from "Dover Beach": "the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the "Sea of Faith." The poem thus becomes a meditation not just on personal loss but on the broader cultural loss of certainty that defined Arnold's era.

Literary Context and Influence

"The Voice" exhibits qualities that place it firmly within the Victorian poetic tradition while also anticipating modernist concerns. Its preoccupation with ruins and fragmentary experience connects it to the Victorian fascination with history and decay, evident in works like Tennyson's "Tithonus" or Browning's dramatic monologues. The poem's psychological intensity and introspection align it with the Victorian tradition of subjective lyric poetry exemplified by Tennyson's "In Memoriam."

At the same time, certain aspects of "The Voice" look forward to modernist poetry. Its fragmented structure, its concern with the limitations of language, and its portrayal of a consciousness in crisis all anticipate the modernist preoccupation with psychological fragmentation and linguistic inadequacy. The poem's opening similes, which present a series of disconnected images united primarily by emotional resonance rather than logical connection, suggest the imagistic technique that would later characterize modernist poetry.

Arnold's influence extends beyond his own era, affecting such diverse poets as T.S. Eliot (who admired Arnold's cultural criticism if not always his poetry) and W.H. Auden (who acknowledged Arnold's influence on his own development). "The Voice," while not among Arnold's most celebrated works, exemplifies the qualities that made him an important transitional figure between Romantic expressiveness and modernist skepticism.

Conclusion

Matthew Arnold's "The Voice" represents a profound exploration of memory, loss, and the disruptive power of the past. Through its carefully structured progression from natural imagery to emotional revelation, its rich symbolic landscape, and its complex thematic concerns, the poem dramatizes the Victorian experience of temporal and spiritual dislocation. The voice that returns "in vain, all, all in vain" embodies both the persistent human desire for connection across time and the ultimate impossibility of fully recovering what has been lost.

The poem's enduring power lies in its honest confrontation with this paradox. Neither offering false consolation nor surrendering to despair, "The Voice" inhabits the uncertain middle ground that characterized Arnold's poetic project and the Victorian mindset more broadly. In its exploration of how we simultaneously desire and resist the voices of our past, the poem speaks not only to its historical moment but to the universal human experience of memory, loss, and the search for meaning in a world of change and uncertainty.

References

Arnold, M. (1852). Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems.

Collini, S. (1988). Arnold. Oxford University Press.

Culler, A.D. (1966). Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold. Yale University Press.

Gottfried, L.A. (1963). Matthew Arnold and the Romantics. University of Nebraska Press.

Honan, P. (1981). Matthew Arnold: A Life. McGraw-Hill.

Johnson, E.D.H. (1969). The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry. Princeton University Press.

Machann, C. (1998). Matthew Arnold: A Literary Life. Macmillan.

Riede, D.G. (1988). Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language. University Press of Virginia.

Trilling, L. (1939). Matthew Arnold. Columbia University Press.