Hayeswater Poem by Matthew Arnold

Hayeswater

Rating: 2.8


A region desolate and wild.
Black, chafing water: and afloat,
And lonely as a truant child
In a waste wood, a single boat:
No mast, no sails are set thereon;
It moves, but never moveth on:
And welters like a human thing
Amid the wild waves weltering.

Behind, a buried vale doth sleep,
Far down the torrent cleaves its way:
In front the dumb rock rises steep,
A fretted wall of blue and grey;
Of shooting cliff and crumbled stone
With many a wild weed overgrown:
All else, black water: and afloat,
One rood from shore, that single boat.

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Ian Fraser 31 March 2011

Arnold is one of the most troubling of the Victorian writers because he sees a world in which he expects to find meaning and finds none. This is not merely a fine piece of landscape poetry but a restless existentialist image.

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Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold

Middlesex / England
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