Matthew Arnold lived during the Victorian period. For much of this century the term Victorian, which literally describes things and events in the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), conveyed connotations of "prudish," "repressed," and "old fashioned." Although such associations have some basis in fact, they do not adequately indicate the nature of this complex, paradoxical a

All these build the poem. They show that the speaker is asking the sea and nature who he is and where he stands in life. He doesn't understand what the world wants him to be. He feels directionless, but is still leading a life that goes "forwards". He is on a ship and as the ship represents mans voyage, this shows his voyage to maturity and self-acceptance. His answer comes over the sea and the stars. They answer him that he needs to find himself to be himself. He must realize who he really is if he wants to be satisfied with himself. He must look deeper into life and not just the shallow waters of life and the world he sees around him. He shouldn't be uniform or "what I ought to be", he should "be thyself", and then he will lose his misery.

Archetypes in the poem are water/sea, which represent mother of all life, spiritual mystery, infinity, death, life, timelessness, and consciousness. The ship represents mankind's voyage through time. The stars show inspiration.

In the third and fourth stanza, Arnold uses imagery and metaphors to depict the setting, which further set the mood of the poem. Throughout the whole poem, Arnold uses a metaphor to describe his views and opinions. Now he only hears its "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar." This is the constant retreat of religious faith in a world now, and being alone in the world. It seems as though Arnold is questioning his own faith. The whole poem is based on a metaphor - Sea to Faith. When the sea retreats, so does faith, and leaves us with nothing. As though love can only prosper on the "land of dreams", not in the timeless sea. In the last nine lines, Arnold wants his love and himself to be true to one another. The land, which he thought was so beautiful and new, is actually nothing - "neither joy, nor love, nor light". In reality, Arnold is expressing that nothing is certain, because where there is light there is dark and where there is happiness there is sadness. He says "let us be true to one another", line 29 - 30, meaning you shouldn't cheat on another but always be honest, unlike the "deceiving" sea and life. In the end, "... ignorant armies clash by night", which is the sea and the land, showing the land cannot win in the end, which is the reason for Arnold's dismay about the loss of Christianity.

http://student.cscc.edu/ENGL/Engl262/arnold.htm

http://www.poets.org/lit/poet/marnofst.htm

ge that was a second English Renaissance. In science and technology, the Victorians invented the modern idea of invention -- the notion that one can create solutions to problems, that man can create new means of bettering himself and his environment. In religion, the Victorians experienced a great age of doubt, the first that called into question institutional Christianity on such a large scale. In literature and the other arts, the Victorians attempted to combine Romantic emphases upon self, emotion, and imagination with Neoclassical ones upon the public role of art and a corollary responsibility of the artist.

In the se

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Approximate Word count = 2034
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)