"The Tide's Pendulum Truth": A Reading of the Poetry of Theological Crisis from Matthew Arnold to R. S. Thomas

I The decisive event which underlies the search for meaning and the despair of it in the 20th century is the loss of God in the 19th century. Paul Tillich J. Hillis Miller has argued that Matthew Arnold's thought provides us with "one of the most important testimonies to the spiritual situation of the nineteenth century" and perhaps the quintessential transition to the twentieth. Millet concludes his argument by saying that "Arnold's last and most characteristic posture is that of the man who waits passively and in tranquil hope for the spark from heaven to fall.... He is ... a survivor who has persisted unwillingly into a time when all he cares for is dead" (Miller, Disappearance 262). Elsewhere, Miller adds, "In a time when the power of organized religion has weakened, people have turned, as Matthew Arnold said they would, to poetry as a stay and prop, even as a means of salvation" ("Literature and Religion" 34). Because Arnold believed that "knowledge" comes primarily through literature--and most specifically through poetry--he argued that religion, which had traditionally informed humans about themselves and their existences, would soon be overtaken and then replaced by poetry. Arnold saw this beginning to happen in his own time, and he prophesied that "[t]he future of poetry is immense, because in poetry ... our race ... will find an ever surer and surer stay" since "the strongest part of our religion," "its unconscious poetry" (Super, IX: 161), provides us with our most certain guide. Arnold's most succinct summary of his position occurs in his essay, "The Study of Poetry." He wrote: More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.... [O]ur religion, ... our philosophy, ... what are they but the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge? The day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted to them, for having taken them seriously; and the more we perceive their hollowness, the more we shall prize "the breath and finer spirit of knowledge" offered to us by poetry (Super, IX: 161-62). Arnold's prophetic testimony for the prestige of poetry and his prediction for its future privileged status could be supported through a detailed analysis of his writings, even though some of the most significant of these works, in Arnold's own estimation (such as the books he specifically devoted to religious issues and which he himself held in high regard), are rarely read or studied today save by the most diligent of Arnold specialists. (1) To use Arnold's own words against him, if the religious essays were, to his mind, "the power of the moment," they are not now "the power of the man." (2) But because it is finally as a poet that I want to place Arnold, and particularly so in terms of later poets and of the poetic progression that he initiated and put into practice, I intend to concentrate on him here primarily in terms of his poetry and specifically in terms of his best known and one of his best poems, "Dover Beach," a poem that provides a paradigm of Arnold's personal theological dilemma as well as "a symbol of the Victorian dilemma" (Cadbury 126) and indeed of the crisis in theological thought in the middle of the nineteenth century. If it is the case, as Miller contends, that "From DeQuincey through Arnold and Browning to Hopkins, Yeats, and Stevens there is a movement from the absence of God to the death of God as starting point and basis" (Poets of Reality 283), then it might be argued that even if Arnold does not go as far back in this movement as DeQuincey, he comes almost as far forward in it as Wallace Stevens--by way of Shelley, Francis Thompson, Clough, some of Browning, Tennyson, and the Rossettis, more of Swinburne, down through Hopkins, Hardy, Housman, Yeats--and as far forward as R. …