With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride?
90 I come to shed them at their side. Oh, hide me in your gloom profound,
Ye solemn seats of holy pain!
Take me, cowled forms, and fence me round,
Till I possess my soul again;
95 Till free my thoughts before me roll,
Not chafed by hourly false control!
For the world cries your faith is now
But a dead time's exploded dream;
My melancholy, sciolists9 say,
IOO Is a passed mode, an outworn theme?
As if the world had ever had
A faith, or sciolists been sad!
Ah, if it be passed, take away,
At least, the restlessness, the pain;
105 Be man henceforth no more a prey
To these out-dated stings again!
6. Writers whose insistence on testing religious 8. A monument inscribed in Teutonic letters beliefs in the light of fact and reason persuaded (runes), emblematic of a Nordic religion that has Arnold that faith in Christianity (especially in the become extinct. The relic reminds the Greek that Roman Catholic or Anglo-Catholic forms) was no his own religion is likewise dying and will soon be longer tenable in the modern world. extinct (see 'Preface' to Poems [1853], p. 1374). 7. Remorse for having adopted the rationalist view 9. Superficial-minded persons who pretend to of Christianity. know the answers to all questions.
.
137 2 / MATTHEW ARNOLD
The nobleness of grief is gone?
Ah, leave us not the fret alone!
But?if you' cannot give us ease?
no Last of the race of them who grieve
Here leave us to die out with these
Last of the people who believe!
Silent, while years engrave the brow;
Silent?the best are silent now.
115 Achilles2 ponders in his tent,
The kings of modern thought3 are dumb;
Silent they are, though not content,
And wait to see the future come.
They have the grief men had of yore,
120 But they contend and cry no more.
Our fathers4 watered with their tears
This sea of time whereon we sail,
Their voices were in all men's ears
Who passed within their puissant hail.
125 Still the same ocean round us raves, But we stand mute, and watch the waves.
For what availed it, all the noise
And outcry of the former men??
Say, have their sons achieved more joys,
130 Say, is life lighter now than then? The sufferers died, they left their pain?
The pangs which tortured them remain.
What helps it now, that Byron bore,
