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What Remains: Matthew Arnold’s Poetics of Place and the Victorian Elegy

TRACY MILLER

Matthew Arnold’s elegy for Charlotte Brontë, “Haworth Churchyard,” includes perhaps the most macrabre image—and embarrassing mistake—

of his poetic oeuvre. In the early part of the poem the speaker laments the impossibility of communing with Brontë, whose body, he suggests, is decaying among the graves in Haworth Churchyard. The speaker describes Brontë’s corpse being covered by and absorbed into the Yorkshire earth:

Turn we next to the dead. —How shall we honor the young, The ardent, the gifted? how mourn? Console we cannot, her ear Is deaf. Far northward from here, In a churchyard high ’mid the moors Of Yorkshire, a little earth Stops it for ever to praise.1

Arnold’s lines revel in the pathos of Brontë’s outdoor grave. Addressing Charlotte, Arnold describes her grave as surrounded by those of her siblings in the bleak parsonage churchyard: “Round thee they lie—the grass / Blows from their graves to thy own!” (ll. 88-89). The churchyard that Arnold describes is the overcrowded plot of land beside the Brontë parsonage. On the edge of the moor, shadowed by a canopy of trees and creeping towards the brick edifice of the parsonage, the churchyard is a synecdoche for all that is strange and morbid about the village of Haworth. In truth, however, the Brontës are buried not in the elegy’s titular churchyard, but rather within Haworth church, the more respectable resting place that would have been natural for the family of the village’s parson. By using Haworth Churchyard and its scene of wind-swept death as his elegy’s conceit, Arnold quite literally misplaces Charlotte Brontë’s final resting place.

Arnold’s mistaken burial is more significant and revealing than schol-ars have hitherto realized. Indeed, this moment of “misburial” is central

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to Arnold’s poetic practice. Arnold’s prolonged attention to the place of Haworth, alongside his displacement of Brontë’s grave—from interior to exterior, from unremarkable church to the mythical landscape of the West Riding of Yorkshire—rewrites the topography of elegiac address and, in so doing, essentially reburies Brontë within the churchyard. “Haworth Church-yard” is an example of how Arnold’s elegies simultaneously produce and exploit the associative power of the site; in so doing, they expand the work of elegy, making it both a genre of consolation and memory and one of spatial production. In this essay, I argue that Arnold’s elegies deploy a revised form of the pastoral and the trope of apostrophe to make people, in their absence, inseparable from the places of their past; in turn the elegies remake these places into sites of mourning and memory that endure despite the consola-tory work of the elegy itself.

Arnold wrote more elegies than any of his Victorian contemporaries, but his poems inched their way into nineteenth-century culture and remain too-often overlooked in our time.2 The elegies appeared on the pages of Corn-hill and Fraser’s magazines or scattered throughout his collected works. They were often buried within tables of contents and featured among the quotidian business of the periodical, sharing pages with articles on university reform and periwinkles.3 Arnold’s poetic practice was often explicitly commercial and his elegies responded to what scholars recognize as the Victorian period’s abiding interest in the rituals of grief and mourning.4 Eager not only for a poem’s publication, but also for the payment that followed such an occasion, Arnold wrote pleadingly to editors, trying to convince them of an elegy’s topicality, beauty, or necessity.5 Despite his best efforts, Arnold’s elegies were largely ignored by contemporary critics and remain unexamined in our own time—indeed, it often seems as though the canon of Victorian elegies has room only for Tennyson. What Arnold has left behind, however, constitutes both an archive of elegies and a means by which to turn the landscapes of the Victorian age into an archive of their own.

Reading Arnold’s poems collectively, we see the contours of the Victo-rian elegy begin to change: it becomes more overtly public and commercial, more diverse and more local. Arnold’s elegies are characterized by a preoc-cupation with place. The poems are site-specific in the sense that not only are they set in the places of their subject’s life and/or death, but, as in the case of “Haworth Churchyard,” they also participate in the production of the setting itself. Site-specificity asks us to view a site as “more than a place,” Miwon Kwon writes.6 Art that arises from and makes use of a specific setting exploits what Gaston Bachelard suggests is an almost primal relationship between space, memory, and desire: we long for the places of our past, no matter how distant or impossible a return to such place may be.7 Arnold’s elegies repeatedly return to the “secret adherence to the actuality of places (in memory, in longing)”

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that Kwon identifies as integral to the practice of site-specific art and to its reception (p. 165). The poems reveal a tremendous faith in the capacity of the landscape to guard, or, as Arnold writes, “keep” the memory of the past alive. “Haworth Churchyard” is a particularly salient example of the ways in which Matthew Arnold’s elegies identify both loss and mourning with spe-cific places and suture grief and memory to the landscape. In the poem this tendency is made literal through an image of Brontë remaining—through her remains—part of the landscape of Haworth itself.

Arnold’s poetic practice incorporates loco-description into the tradi-tional framework of the elegy. His poems reveal the extent to which Vic-torian memorial practices at mid-century were often site-specific: memory was anchored in the places of the past, and forms of pilgrimage—both real and imaginative—were essential to the work of mourning. In their specific-ity, Arnold’s poems revise the broad strokes with which traditional pastoral landscapes were so often painted. This revision allows for vicarious forms of imaginative engagement with a landscape marked by memory and loss. As Peter Sacks notes, the landscape of elegy often plays a critical role in the genre’s enactment of the stages of mourning: the process by which the speaker (and, implicitly, the reader) moves from loss to consolation.8 The elegy’s tra-ditional pastoral landscape performs the process of renewal that the speaker experiences throughout the course of the poem as winter turns to spring, flowers bloom again, and the spectacle of natural renewal contains within it the promise of a similar rebirth and renewal for both elegiac subject and speaker. Jahan Ramazani suggests that it is “the psychological propensity of the genre to translate grief into consolation” through such conventions as the pastoral and its easy symbolism.9 Although at times deeply implicated in the pastoral tradition that critics recognize as characteristic of the (pre-twentieth-century) elegy, the landscapes of Arnold’s elegies enact a very different form of mourning. Arnold’s elegies use the tropes associated with the genre and lyric more generally—among them, the pastoral, the deictic, the anaphora, and the apostrophe—to suture both grief and memory onto the landscape. In Arnold’s hands the elegy becomes less about what Max Cavitch discusses as “fantasies about worlds we cannot reach”—a reunion with the dead—than about a way to tolerate, claim, and celebrate loss by recognizing what remains.10

“Haworth Churchyard” produces a version of Brontë’s grave that seemed somehow more suitable than her actual resting place even to Arnold’s most discerning critics. Following the publication of the elegy Elizabeth Gaskell wrote to Arnold, thanking him for a poem that she called “above my praise.”11

After suggesting that his mention of Emily Brontë would have made “her heart leap with joy, could she have read it,” Gaskell tentatively corrects Arnold for his mistaken burial site:

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I hardly know whether to tell you—but they lie all buried under heavy stones just close before the altar in Haworth Church.—one longs for her & Emily to have had their burial-places where the breeze from their own moors might have stirred the grass growing over them. (Letters, 1:316)

As a reader, Gaskell “longs” for such a poetic resting place as the one Arnold created in “Haworth Churchyard.” She too imagines a burial on “their own moors” as the most suitable place for Charlotte and her siblings. The “heavy stones” of Gaskell’s description contrast with the landscape of Arnold’s poem and Gaskell seems wistful even in her description of the correct place of the Brontës’ graves.

In his response to Gaskell, Arnold also seems to favor the metaphorical possibilities of an outdoor burial:

I am almost sorry you told me about the place of their burial. It really seems to put the finishing touch on the strange cross-grained character of the fortunes of that ill-fated family that they should even be placed after death in the wrong, uncongenial spot. (Letters, 1:317)

Arnold’s response to Brontë fiction and lore is to read the injustice of their indoor internment as additional evidence of what Gaskell’s 1857 biography of Brontë would soon suggest was the fated lives of the Brontë siblings. According to Arnold, nature intended the Brontës to be buried outside; fortune inter-fered, and the heavy stones and stifling air of Haworth Church are not only uncongenial but also wrong. Arnold’s image of the Yorkshire earth enveloping Brontë anticipates the way in which Brontë has been remembered and remade by literary biographers, critics, and commentators in the years following her death and even to this day: she is inseparable from Haworth, a part of the place itself. The elegy, like so many subsequent treatments of Brontë, “buries” her in the landscape of her life and work. Arnold’s preoccupation with the particulars of a place as essential to an elegy’s memory work characterizes not only “Haworth Churchyard,” but the majority of his elegies as well.

I. Landscape and Memory: Mapping “The Scholar-Gipsy” and “Thyrsis”

Matthew Arnold described “The Scholar-Gipsy,” a poem set among the Cumner Hills that surround Oxford University, as an elegy, perhaps as Ken-neth and Miriam Allott assert “a lament for youth’s wholeheartedness and energy” (CP, p. 356); he returned to the same landscape and the same mythical figure of the Scholar-Gipsy in “Thyrsis,” his elegy for Arthur Clough. In both poems, the Oxford landscape is more than a setting; it contains within it the history of the speaker and his subject’s past and is thus essential to the acts of mourning and memory that the poems perform. Although “pastoral” in

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name, the elegies favor loco-description over the abstract comforts of a pastoral landscape. Their inclusion in the genre of the pastoral elegy depends upon Arnold’s expansion of the mode to accommodate the specificity of place—the “here” of the Cumner Hills—within the generalized landscapes of pastoral.12

“The Scholar-Gipsy” begins with a vigil and a speaker’s resolution to remain “here”—keeping vigil for the Scholar-Gipsy. As the poem opens, the speaker states his determined pursuit of the Scholar-Gipsy:

Here, where the reaper was at work of late—In this high field’s dark corner, where he leavesHis coat, his basket, and his earthen cruse,And in the sun all morning binds the sheaves,Then here, at noon, comes back his stores to use—Here will I sit and wait. (ll. 11-16)

The repetition of “here” and the particularity of place—the dark corner of the high field, marked by the things of a reaper’s work and leisure—introduce the topographical specificity that will characterize all of “The Scholar-Gipsy.” “Here” both opens the stanza and follows the interlude about the reaper’s abode that is set off by the dash. The word orients readers and takes them back to the speaker’s insistence on his position among the accoutrements of the reaper’s life. The speaker then describes the vigil he will keep until the Gipsy appears: “Screened in this nook o’er the high, half-reaped field, / And here till sun-down, shepherd! will I be” (ll. 21-22). Again, the repetition of “here” signals the speaker’s position in a specific part of the landscape. His insistence on his “hereness” at this early juncture of the poem affixes the speaker to the landscape in a way similar to the poem (and the myth’s) graft-ing of the myth of the Scholar-Gipsy onto Oxford’s geography. In addition, the speaker’s presence seems in its repetition to emphasize the absence of something else—what has been lost and is no longer “here.”

This repetition of “here” also echoes one of the conventions of the pastoral: its insistence on its own place-boundedness. From Theocritus and Virgil’s classical elegies to the reinvigoration of the form by, among others, Ben Jonson and John Milton, the deictic “here” (or the Latin hic) orients readers in a consolatory pastoral landscape: here are sweetly humming bees, here are cool springs, here is where the daisies grow. The pastoral landscape is most remarkable in lacking anything remarkable: the “here” of Theocritus and the “here” of Milton and Jonson, for example, all use broad strokes to signal the simple, Arcadian comforts of the pastoral.13 In Arnold’s poem, however, the insistence on “here” and the way the word gestures towards a pastoral landscape orient both poet and reader within the tradition of the pastoral but alter and expand this tradition to signal the particular place of the myth of the Scholar-Gipsy—a place that might be revisited for solace not

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only textually but through the kind of pilgrimage (both real and imaginary) the speaker enacts.

In “The Scholar-Gipsy” readers are introduced to a speaker who repeat-edly announces the place-bound nature of his pursuit, and who, by positioning himself within the landscape, becomes a particularly fit guide. The speaker, an Oxford student pursuing the mythic figure that inhabits his University’s surroundings, recasts himself as an occupant of the rural landscape: he speaks the language of the shepherds and rests in the shelters of the reaper. It is precisely this status—he both belongs to the Cumner Hill and resides outside it; he is both Oxonian and shepherd—that makes the Scholar-Gipsy such a mythic figure for the speaker, who now takes on a similarly mythic persona through the transformative powers of poetry. Somewhat counter-intuitively, a poem about the pursuit of myth across a place is grounded in topographical specificity: the poem’s efforts to map, capture, and thus “fix” the Scholar-Gipsy to the Oxford landscape attempts to root the (immaterial) myth in the landscape. It tracks the places of the Scholar-Gipsy’s past: the Cumner Hurst (l. 57), “some lone alehouse in the Berkshire moors” (l. 58), the Oxford ferry crossing at Bab-lock-hithe (ll. 72, 75), the Wychwood bowers (l. 79), Godstow Bridge (l. 91), and Bagley Wood (l. 111). Alongside many of these places, “Thyrsis” introduces Childsworth farm (l. 11), Ilsley Downs (l. 14), Ensham and Sandford (l. 109), and the Wytham flats (l. 123) to the same landscape. Arnold emphasizes specific observation, frees the pastoral from the classical tradition he has inherited and turns instead toward a loco-descriptive mode. This mode grounds mourning in the landscape by highlighting the speaker’s intimacy with specific places of his loss and inviting readers to locate these places for themselves.

The speaker’s own haunting of the hills in search of the haunting scholar-gipsy allows him to participate in the very pursuit he is mythologizing in the poem. In so doing, he renders poetic practice a privileged means by which to know and remember a place. Poetry becomes both an elaborate form of make-believe that brings speaker and audience alike closer to what has been lost (youth, in this case, but also the Cumner landscape itself) and a means by which to remake and memorialize a place in such a way as to stave off the very losses the poem mourns.

In “Thyrsis” the confident cartographic eye of a speaker familiar with the particulars of the Cumner landscape gives way to a more hesitant optics that attempt to reconcile past and present through the changing shape of the landscape. The places of the poem—many of the same places featured in “The Scholar-Gipsy”—are now testaments to the passage of time, the force of progress, and the so-called “strange disease of modern life” (l. 203) that “The Scholar-Gipsy” identified creeping into the Cumner hills. “Thyrsis” begins with a return:

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How changed is here each spot man makes or fills! In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same; The village street its haunting mansion lacks,And from the sign is gone Sibylla’s name, And from the roofs the twisted chimney-stacks— Are ye too changed, ye hills?See, ’tis no foot of unfamiliar men To-night from Oxford up your pathway strays! Here came I often, often, in old days—Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then. (ll. 1-10)

The poem begins not with an immediate lamentation for Thyrsis, but rather with a slow, melancholy account of a landscape where “nothing keeps the same” (l. 2). The speaker has returned to his beloved Oxford to discover what he will later call “some loss of habit’s power” (l. 22); the landscape he once knew so intimately bears little resemblance to what he discovers upon his be-lated return. The Cross Keys, a lodging house kept by Sibylla Curr (who died in 1860), no longer looms over South Hinksey’s main street (CP, p. 539). The speaker notes the absence of the “twisted chimney-stacks” of the centuries-old buildings, now probably razed or deteriorating: what Arnold portrayed in “The Scholar-Gipsy” and tries to reclaim in “Thyrsis” as pastoral countryside was in reality quickly shifting away from its agrarian past. Turning towards the hills in a frustrated apostrophic address, the speaker looks to what remains of the natural landscape, seeking reassurance in the face of such an altered place. Only after cataloguing the demise of the two Hinkseys does the speaker arrive at the poem’s ostensible subject: in a past that no longer obtains, I used to know this place, as did Thyrsis, for “we still had Thyrsis then” (l. 10).

The opening stanza of “Thyrsis” echoes its most esteemed poetic pre-decessor, Milton’s “Lycidas,” but significantly changes the pastoral landscape established at the beginning of Milton’s poem. Lycidas also begins with a speaker’s return to a familiar landscape: “Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more / Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never-sere, / I come to pluck your Berries harsh and crude” (ll. 1-4).14 In “Lycidas” the speaker apologizes to the landscape for his unseasonable return. He has come back “once more” and seeks to reap its bounty “before the mellowing year”; out of season he will force the unripe berries from their trees; he will make the landscape alter its agricultural rhythms to accommodate his melancholic return. Like Lycidas, the fruits of summer will be “dead ere [their] prime” (l. 8): picked before they ripen fully, these fruits are still able to satisfy the speaker by reminding him of renewal in the face of loss. In “Thyrsis,” by contrast, the speaker’s return to a familiar landscape yields no agricultural splendor to assuage his loss. Instead, the landscape echoes his loss: place offers no comfort, nature has not

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renewed itself, and the harvest will bear no fruits. The landscape only further alienates the speaker, who returns to a place seeking the ache of memory only to discover that many of the recognizable markers of the past he shared with Thyrsis have been destroyed.

Once more privileging loco-description over the abstractions character-istic of conventional pastoral poetry, Arnold revises the pastoral convention of the flower catalogue to accommodate better the specificity of his Oxford landscape. The first part of “Thyrsis” tracks the speaker’s attempt to orient himself in the now- unfamiliar landscape of the Oxford countryside. “Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here, / But once I knew each field, each flower, each stick” (ll. 32-33), the fourth stanza begins. In an apostrophe to Thyrsis, Arnold includes the characteristic pastoral flower catalogue:

Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon, Sweet-William with his homely cottage-smell, And stocks in fragrant blow (ll. 62-66)

The catalogue further incorporates “Thyrsis” into the genre of the pastoral; it perhaps most pronouncedly echoes Milton’s famous flower catalogue:

Bring the rathe Primrose that forsaken dies.The tufted Crow-toe, and pale Jessamine,The white Pink, and the Pansy freakt with jet,The glowing Violet. ( ll. 142-5)

Arnold’s flower catalogue also gestures towards the trope of natural renewal—another elegiac convention. The catalogue suggests that, despite the loss of both the speaker’s familiarity with the place and Thyrsis, the landscape will continue to regenerate and nature will endure in the face of loss. Two crucial differences between Arnold and Milton’s flower catalogues, however, are the seasons of the flowers that they name and the flowers’ natural habitat. Ar-nold’s flowers, as the poem itself indicates, are of “midsummer”: carnations, snapdragons, and Sweet-William. The flowers of “Lycidas,” in contrast, all belong to early spring: primrose, crow-toe, jasmine (“Jessamine”), pansies, and violet. Milton’s speaker uses “rathe,” for example, to describe the primrose; this suggests that the flower, like the speaker at the beginning of the poem, has come too early. The flowers of “Thyrsis’s” landscape, however, echo the belatedness that the speaker himself experiences upon his return; like the speaker and his elegy’s subject, they are not youthful (spring-like). They instead indicate a mid-summer prime that looks forward to decay. The catalogue in “Thyrsis” is also full of flowers native to England; this once more establishes the poem’s pastoral as a recognizable and distinctly English landscape (as

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opposed to the generalized settings of antiquity’s pastorals).As the poem progresses, the speaker becomes threatened by what he

perceives to be the futility of elegy. He explicitly links place, loss, and memory:

Well! Wind-dispersed and vain the words will be, Yet, Thyrsis, let me give my grief its hour In the old haunt, and find our tree-topped hill!Who, if not I, for questing here hath power? I know the wood which hides the daffodil, I know the Fyfield tree, I know what white, what purple fritillaries The grassy harvest of the river-fields, Above by Ensham, down by Sandford yields, And what sedged brooks are Thames’s tributaries;

I know these slopes; who knows them if not I? (ll. 101-111)

In his acknowledgment that elegy may be futile, the speaker implicitly links elegy and place. He suggests that his words might be “wind-dispersed”: swept out across the landscape, scattered, uncontained. Faced with this possibility, he then turns to place to justify his distress: “let me give my grief its hour / In the old haunt” (ll. 102-103). He asserts his authority over both the Cumner landscape and, implicitly, the terms of the elegy.

As the speaker turns from words to “questing,” an anaphora (“I know”) emphasizes both his intimacy with the specifics of the Cumner landscape and the belatedness of his return. In the poem the speaker signals his (past) familiarity with the particulars of the landscape through the repetition of “I know.” Many pastoral elegies create the impression that, like the reader, the speaker is a stranger in the place, having arrived only at the moment of the death of the elegy’s subject. In “Thyrsis,” however, the certainty of the speaker’s “I know” implies a past. “I know” lacks the sheer presence of the deictic “here” and indicates both the particularity of the poem’s landscape and the speaker’s familiarity with it. As Ellen Zetzel Lambert notes, in traditional pastoral poetry the repetition of “here” indicates a certainty of presence and a confidence that the landscape of the pastoral is a fit place for a speaker’s grief. Lambert argues that the deictic “here” signals a “concrete, palpable world, a world in which the elegist can place diffuse, intangible feelings of grief and thereby win his release from suffering” (p. xiv). In these versions of the pas-toral, the speaker’s familiarity with the landscape is less important than his sense that the “here” of his poem is recognizably pastoral and thus a fit place for his grief. In “Thyrsis,” by contrast, the phrase “I know” suggests that the speaker is not turning to the Cumner Hills for their implicit suitability for his elegy. Rather, the return to place can offer a different kind of consolation:

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the comfort of memory and the assurance of what remains in the places that have been left behind.

“Thyrsis” is a poem about the making and unmaking of the pastoral, the limits and possibilities of the relation between place and memory, and the ways in which locodescription can “fix” memory to landscape in the “old haunt” (l. 103) of the speaker’s past. By so doing, the poem refuses the easy consolation that pastoral elegies often provide. It makes the very unrealistic genre of the pastoral real by rooting it in the particulars of a place. “Thyrsis” ends not with a turn towards springtime or the intimation of immortality that marks the final lines of “Lycidas.” Instead, consolation comes from the speaker’s return to the Cumner landscape, which he recognizes as a fit recep-tacle for his memories of Thyrsis:

And this rude Cumner ground,

Its fir-topped Hurst, its farms, its quiet fields, Here cam’st thou in thy jocund youthful time, Here was thine height of strength, thy golden prime! And still the haunt beloved a virtue yields. (ll. 216-220)

At the end of the poem, “here” replaces “I know” as the speaker’s refrain. The poem’s return to the deictic suggests an increased alliance between speaker and audience; after reading two hundred lines describing and memorializing the “rude Cumner ground,” the reader has come to know the landscape well enough to recognize it in the simple refrain of “here.” The “I” of the speaker has given way to the “eye” of the audience and we have had the authenticating experience of the historical landscape itself.

Susan Stewart identifies the deictic as one of the generic features of lyric that works to “anchor a spinning subject.”15 She suggests that deixis functions as a device of immediacy as well as “a set of temporal frames for subjectivity” (p. 222). Words like “now” and “here” anchor a body within a specific place—in Arnold’s case, the fictional topography of pastoral. Furthermore, by pointing to the material or the temporal (this, that, here, now), deixis insists on the presentness of the poem and on the implicit relation between speaker and audience. It quite literally grounds subjectivity both by making the poem’s audience part of an exchange (we must respond to the speaker’s pointing) and by demarcating a specific time and place for the subject to occupy. In Arnold’s Cumner Hills elegies, the “here” of the pastoral returns to announce that Oxford is the new Arcadia—or a specific form of Arcadia suitable not to the abstractions of pastoral poetry but to the particularities of Thyrsis’ history. The deictic thus anchors both speaker and reader in what has emerged by the end of the poem as a particular, material world: a world that is permanently marked by what no longer remains. In this way, the elegy becomes a general

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object of mourning that exemplifies a different form of portability: by the end of the poem its form of grief and commemoration emerges as available to all who have come to know the specificities of this landscape of loss.

The poem has tracked Thyrsis’ wanderings away from Oxford, away from a form of poetry of which the speaker approved, and finally into the unknown “night” (l. 230) of death. Yet it still recognizes a concrete “here” and, in so doing, fixes Thrysis’ memory and the absent presence of his youth to the “haunt” on the outskirts of Oxford. The final stanza represents Thyrsis and the Scholar-Gipsy as two ghosts, who haunt both the speaker’s memory and the Cumber hills. It makes Thyrsis’ haunting literal by allowing his words to conclude the elegy:

Why faintest thou? I wandered till I died. Roam on! The light we seek is shining still. Does thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill, Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side. (ll. 236-240, italics in the original)

The reader is left with remains that are rooted in the earth (the elm tree) and in myth (the Scholar-Gipsy’s wanderings) but that are also insistently located in the melancholic landscape of the Cumner Hills. Arnold’s elegies offer a different narrative of grief and mourning from those of the better-known examples of pastoral elegy. In so doing, they expand the generic territory of the elegy by suggesting that part of its work is not to move past grief but to create textual landscapes where loss lingers and the work of mourning, like the wanderings of the Scholar-Gipsy, never ends.

II. Speaking to and through places: the apostrophe

In “The Scholar-Gipsy” and “Thyrsis,” the speaker turns to the land-scape to locate and project loss and memory onto the places of his and his subjects’ past. The elegies make mourning material by portraying the land-scape as a receptacle for loss and a bulwark against the linear progress of grief. In both poems, traces of the past remain despite the forces of progress that the speaker of “Thyrsis” initially laments; the elegies end with an image of loss fixed both materially and spectrally to the Cumner hills. “Thyrsis” and “The Scholar-Gipsy” depict a solitary speaker turning to familiar landscapes to both assuage and attenuate his longing. Arnold’s elegies for Wordsworth also feature a solitary speaker’s pilgrimage to a memorable place. Whereas in “Thyrsis” and “The Scholar-Gipsy” the speaker is repeatedly confronted with the silence and absent presence of his elegies’ subjects, however, in Arnold’s poems for Wordsworth the landscape speaks back and takes on some of the burden of grief through the animating trope of the apostrophe. In Arnold’s elegies for Wordsworth the tropes of lyric address become markers of the loss and grief sedimented within the Lake District landscape of Wordsworth’s life

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and death. Arnold’s use of lyric conventions, in particular the apostrophe, allows the elegies to obviate the need for a mourner by suggesting that the landscape can both contain and elegize its own inhabitants.

The apostrophe addresses an absent audience—whether the West Wind, the sick rose, or the elegiac subject—and animates it through the fiction of address. Jonathan Culler argues that the apostrophe is a mode of address that can deny or evade the limits of ontology: apostrophe can animate the inanimate. For Culler, the structure of apostrophe—Shelley’s command to the West Wind to “make me thy lyre”—establishes a set of relations between subject and object that assumes commensurability.16 The “I-You” relations of the apostrophe represent a poem’s investment in the ability of verse to tran-scend what we assume to be the limits of subjectivity; tropes, Culler insists, are forms of anthropomorphism. Barbara Johnson describes apostrophe as a kind of ventriloquism “through which the speaker throws voice, life, and human form into the addressed, turning its silence into mute responsive-ness.”17 For Johnson, Shelley’s “West Wind” thus makes explicit not only the relation between apostrophe and animation, but also the function of apostrophe in lyric verse: what the poet animates is him/herself in the form of a silent interlocutor. Apostrophe for Culler and Johnson is thus a form of projection. The apostrophe demands a material relationship: the illusion of a person, place, or thing listening and speaking back to the speaker. Whether the apostrophe is directed at a natural object or an absent subject, it is a sign of faith in the inanimate world’s ability to listen and to respond. It is also a mapping of self onto an object. The presence of apostrophe in lyric tells us that the landscape—the rocks, stones, and trees of Wordsworth’s elegies, and the Cumner Hills and gloomy chapels of Arnold’s—can be animated and made into a receptacle for responses we assume to be located within the lyric speaker.

Nowhere does Arnold use the apostrophe more frequently than in his two elegies for William Wordsworth: “Memorial Verses” and “The Youth of Nature.” Both elegies “fix” Wordsworth in his beloved Lake District: “Memo-rial Verses” is rooted in the place where Wordsworth is buried, and “The Youth of Nature” explores the landscape surrounding his grave. Both of Arnold’s poems contain a solitary speaker traversing the area around Grasmere who calls out to Wordsworth and the world around him and who mourns the poet’s loss as well as what the poems suggest is the death of nature poetry itself.

“Memorial Verses” begins at the grave and casts Wordsworth, whose death followed those of Byron and Goethe, as the last in a line of great poets. “The last poetic voice is dumb— / We stand to-day by Wordsworth’s tomb,” Arnold writes. After summarizing the contributions made by Byron and Goethe, the speaker implores the two poets, now “pale ghosts,” to “rejoice” upon the arrival of Wordsworth to “your shadowy world” (l. 36). The speaker compares Wordsworth to his two fellow poets and suggests that Wordsworth’s

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death is particularly dire. The speaker argues that whereas Byron gave readers passion while teaching little and Goethe diagnosed the wounds of the “suf-fering human race” (l. 19), Wordsworth introduced readers to nature, and, in so doing, made them feel:

He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth, Smiles broke from us and we had ease. (ll. 48-50)

Wordsworth’s “healing power” (l. 63) was his ability to animate the natural world. Through his verse, “the breeze / Went o’er the sun-lit fields again” (ll. 51-52) and “Our foreheads felt the wind and rain” (l. 52); youth returned and the “freshness of the early world” (l. 57) opened the reader’s spirits. After describing this singular contribution, the poem then gives way to a lament: “Others will strengthen us to bear— / But who, ah! who, will make us feel?” (ll. 66-67). As if in response to this cry, Arnold apostrophizes the Rotha, the river that flows in the shadow of Wordsworth’s grave:

Keep fresh the grass upon his grave O Rotha, with they living wave! Sing him thy best! for few or none Hears thy voice right, now he is gone. (ll. 71-74)

Although there may be another Byron or Goethe, the speaker doubts that a figure like Wordsworth will appear again, and he turns to the Rotha to protect what remains of Wordsworth: the verdant grass above his grave. The apostrophe is a figure that attempts to overcome what Culler calls “the alien-ation of subject from object” by constituting the object as an audience and potential interlocutor for the lyric speaker (p. 43). Here, the speaker’s appeal to the Rotha acknowledges the alienation he feels in Wordsworth’s wake; the apostrophe assuages this alienation by creating the illusion that something listens back. By calling out to the landscape, the speaker is asking the river to do what he feels he cannot or will not do: keep the memory and the voice of Wordsworth alive.

Assigning the duty of memorializing Wordsworth to the landscape also unburdens the responsibilities of grief and memory. The poem echoes one of Wordsworth’s most famous poems about death, “We Are Seven,” in insisting on the significance of the material markers of death. Much like the young girl in Wordsworth’s poem, who repeatedly points to the green graves of her lost siblings to insist that they be quite literally “counted,” Arnold’s speaker is able to evade loss and attenuate mourning by placing Wordsworth in the verdant landscape of his past. “We Are Seven” encourages the reader to bristle against the speaker’s inquisition of the girl and presents the siblings’ sojourn in the churchyard as an equally plausible form of life. The girl’s constant vigil

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by her siblings’ graves (“And there upon the ground I sit— / And sing a song to them,” ll. 43-44) exemplifies the materiality of mourning and the way in which the dead might be kept alive in the places of their past.18 Whereas in “We Are Seven,” the everyday activities that constitute the girl’s vigil—mending stockings, hemming kerchiefs and eating supper at the grave “when it is light and fair” (l. 46)—is what keeps her siblings counted, in “Memorial Verses” the speaker assigns the vigil to the landscape. He attempts to renounce his own responsibility to grieve by making the landscape both receptacle and agent of mourning.

“The Youth of Nature” opens on the very lake that became the guard-ian of Wordsworth’s memory. And as if answering the speaker of “Memorial Verses,” the poem describes a Grasmere landscape that has flourished in spite of Wordsworth’s death. “The spots which recall him survive, / For he lent a new life to these hills,” Arnold writes (ll. 13-14). Arnold makes explicit the relation between place and memory and what Tim Creswell calls “the imagi-nary materiality” of fictional landscapes by animating the places depicted in Wordsworth’s verse.19 We encounter a speaker who is a reader of Wordsworth’s poetry and who thus animates the Grasmere landscape through his knowledge of Wordsworthian poetics. The poem describes a landscape that is a testament to Wordsworth’s legacy. It catalogues the places of Wordsworth’s past and thus charts the course of his poetics with topographical specificity: the pillar along the Ennerdale Lake from Wordsworth’s “The Brothers” (l. 15); the “Evening Star,” the cottage from “Michael” (l. 18); and the “Banks of Tone” from “Ruth” (l. 24) all feature in the elegy. In this careful survey of landscape, “The Youth of Nature” begins to mimic Wordsworth’s own poetics of place: his sense of the English landscape as genius loci and what Geoffrey Hartman calls Wordsworth’s inscriptive approach to the landscape, by which he created a romantic poetics through the natural world of his verse.20

The elegiac mode of the poem returns, however, when the speaker concludes that, although the places of Wordsworth’s poetry survive, the land is marked by the poet’s absence:

These survive!—yet not without pain,Pain and dejection to-night,Can I feel that their poet is gone. (ll. 25-27)

In an apparent reversal of the logic of the pathetic fallacy, Arnold’s speaker takes on the sentiments of these monuments to Wordsworth’s poetic legacy and articulates “their” pain. Here, instead of the dynamic typical of the pa-thetic fallacy, we find sentiment transferred from landscape to subject. The pairing of “I” and “their” in line 27 depicts an exchange between speaker and landscape; the speaker is a visceral witness for the landscape, and, animating the places through the pronoun “their,” he feels on and in the landscape the pain of Wordsworth’s absence.

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In “The Youth of Nature,” Arnold uses the apostrophe to contemplate the relation between poetry and natural beauty and the fate of nature poetry in the wake of Wordsworth’s death. Calling out to the Grasmere landscape, the speaker asks:

For, oh! Is it you Moonlight, and shadow, and lake, And mountains, that fill us with joy, Or the poet who signs you so well? Is it you, O beauty, O grace, O charm, O romance, that we feel, Or the voice which reveals what you are? Are ye, like daylight and sun, Shared and rejoiced in by all? Or are ye immersed in the mass Of matter, and hard to extract, Or sunk at the core of the world Too deep for the most to discern? (ll. 59-71)

In this stanza and in the response of Nature that follows, the apostrophe becomes a useful form through which to stage a debate about the relations among beauty, poetry, and self-knowledge. The excess of the apostrophe is not typical of the poetic style of either Wordsworth or Arnold; it appears more frequently in the “noble” abstractions of eighteenth-century poets such as Wil-liam Collins and James Thomson.21 The speaker abandons the topographical specificity of “Memorial Verses’” apostrophe to the Rotha and casts his address in a litany of abstractions. This very excess signals Arnold’s conclusion; by rejecting a Wordsworthian approach to the landscape, his diction returns us to the poet’s own example. He employs the artifice against which Wordsworth bristled in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads to stage the limits of poetry and to arrive at a conclusion similar to the one Wordsworth reached: he privileges the rational mind’s response to an objective natural world, devalues poetic privilege (the poet as a man speaking to men), and affirms that the natural world is not “too deep for most to discern” (l. 71).

Arnold’s speaker concludes that everyone is capable of experiencing beauty, with or without the poet’s assistance. The “murmur of Nature” (l. 78) replies to the speaker’s apostrophe and assures him that the beauty, grace, charm, and romance that Wordsworth’s poetry celebrated are part of the natural world:

They abide; and the finest of souls Hath not been thrilled by them all, Nor the dullest been dead to them quite.

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The poet who sings them may die, But they are immortal and live, For they are the life of the world. (ll. 81-86)

“Nature” describes its pleasures as available to both the finest and the most dull souls, and creates a hierarchy of appreciations based upon the refinement of the individual’s sensibilities.22 This evaluation of intellectual and poetic sensibility reappears in Arnold’s later prose criticism. “Nature” then almost chides the speaker and his excessive elegizing through an exasperated question:

Will ye not learn it, and know, When ye mourn that a poet is dead, That the singer was less than his themes, Life, and emotion, and I? (ll. 87-90)

The apostrophic structure of “The Youth of Nature” allows Nature to guide the speaker’s mourning process. Rather than the traditional elegy’s insistence on immortality, in this poem, Nature’s assurance that the beauty (and, implicitly, the memory) that poetry brings out occurs apart from the poet allows the speaker to reach some form of consolation. The landscape remains marked by Wordsworth’s presence (the posts, pillars, and cottages of his fictional geography) but the speaker seems to be consoled. The echoes of Wordsworth’s poetry that remain in the landscape are almost inconsequential; they become empty markers of a poetics that does not seem necessary by the end of the poem. The work of mourning is thus displaced from speaker onto landscape, and Arnold’s form of consolation bears little resemblance to that of the traditional elegy. In Shelley’s “Adonais,” for example, the speaker, echoing John Donne, insists “’tis Death is dead, not he / Mourn not for Adonais” and implores Dawn to “turn all thy dew to splendor” so as to imbue the landscape with Keats’s immortality.23 In Arnold’s poems, by contrast, the natural world offers reassurance not because it endures in the face of death, but because it eclipses the poetic powers of Wordsworth. After questioning the fate of poetry in “Memorial Verses,” Arnold concludes in “The Youth of Nature” that the elegiac subject and object are almost inconsequential and finds in the natural world an answer to the problem of grief and the fate of poetry.

Arnold’s elegies demonstrate the ways in which place might turn time in on itself, allowing grief to linger in the landscapes of those left behind. Robert Pogue Harrison describes the familiar gravestone phrase “here lies” as the tombstone deictic. “Here lies” is a phrase that marks and appropriates a plot of land by demarcating a topography for loss and a material reminder of the dead. The tombstone deictic is the most literal and exaggerated example of the ways in which loss and memory colonize space. We do not dispute the mourner’s right to seek solace in the space of the graveyard and the grave itself

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insists that we recognize it as a place of mourning and of memory. Harrison writes, “For what is a place if not its memory of itself—a site or locale where time turns back upon itself? The grave marks a site in the landscape where time cannot merely pass through, or pass over.”24 Harrison suggests that landscape refutes the linear progress of time. The landscape of the graveyard adamantly defies the telos of grief that we have come to believe is characteristic of the genre of elegy and is necessary to its consolatory work. The gravesite, like the landscapes of Arnold’s elegies, no longer belongs to the dead. “Here lies” marks a place, makes it one’s own—belonging not really to the dead but rather to the living who take imaginary possession of it in order to preserve what has been lost, to keep it visible, to make it count.

Notes

1 Matthew Arnold, “Haworth Churchyard,” The Complete Poems, ed. Kenneth and Miriam Allott (New York: Longman, 1979). All quotations from Arnold’s poetry are from this edition, hereafter cited as CP.

2 In addition to the elegies that this essay considers, Arnold wrote “Heine’s Grave” in 1863 for the German poet Henrick Heine; “Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann’” in 1849 for the French writer Étienne Pivert de Senancour; “Stanzas in Memory of Edward Quillinan” in 1851 for the poet Edward Quillinan, who was also the husband of Wordsworth’s daughter Dora; “Rugby Chapel” in 1857 for his father Thomas Arnold; two elegies for his brother William in 1861, “Stanzas from Carnac” and “A Southern Night”; and his elegies for his family pets. “Haworth Churchyard” also included a tribute to Harriet Martineau, who was believed to be dying at the time (but recovered from her illness).

3 See Matthew Arnold, “Memorial Verses,” Fraser’s Magazine (June 1850): 630; “Thyrsis,” Macmillan’s Magazine (April 1866): 449-454; “Haworth Churchyard,” Fraser’s Magazine (June 1855): 527-530; “Poor Matthias,” Macmillan’s Magazine (December 1882): 81-85.

4 For more on Victorian death and mourning culture see John Morley, Death, Heaven and the Victorians (London: Studio Vista, 1971); James Stevens Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death (Detroit: Partridge Press, 1972); Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994); Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996); Peter Sinnema, The Wake of Wellington (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press 2006).

5 For example, following the publication of an article by Arnold on Henrick Heine in the August 1863 issue of Cornhill Magazine, Arnold wrote to Cornhill’s editor, George Smith, offering him an elegy he wrote for Heine (“Heine’s Grave”). In what reads as an attempt at a savvy sales pitch, Arnold describes the elegy as “a sort of poetic pendant to my prose article.” He offered the elegy for immediate publication but it never ap-peared in the magazine. So too did he explicitly appeal to Fraser’s to publish “Haworth Churchyard.” Arnold received on average £25 for every article or poem published in Cornhill Magazine. He was also paid £25 for “Thrysis,” published simultaneously in Macmillan’s and The Atlantic Monthly in April 1866. See CP, p. 507; and Nicholas Murray, A Life of Matthew Arnold (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), esp. pp. 219-222.

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6 Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), p. 30.

7 See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). Bachelard’s work is particularly important for its emphasis on the associative possibilities that arise from literary and in particular poetic representations of space. He argues that memory and imagination transform and expand the geometrical boundaries of a space. “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space,” he writes (p. 47). This relation between place, memory, and the imaginary inhabitation of the spaces of our past renders space and place portable; the transcendence of geometrical space also allows us to imaginatively transcend time and to carry the places of our past with us through the imaginative repossession of space that we see, for example, in the poetic representations of past spaces on which Bachelard so heavily relies.

8 Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985), p. 1.

9 Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 3.

10 Max Cavitch, American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (Min-neapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. 1.

11 Matthew Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold: Vol. I, 1829-1859, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1996-2001), p. 315.

12 The pastoral elegy is a subset of the genre of elegy that incorporates the conventions of pastoral poetry into the elegy’s fabric. The form recasts both the speaker and the dead he/she mourns into the role of shepherds and situates them within an Arcadian landscape that echoes the speaker’s mourning. As Paul Alpers notes, in pastoral elegy the landscape appears “devastated by [the speaker’s] loss” (What is Pastoral? [Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1996], p. 96). Pastoral conventions such as shepherds’ songs, flower catalogues (in tribute to the dead), and serial listings of “birds and beasts, fountains and streams, trees and mountains [lamenting] the dead shepherd” emphasize the ways in which the natural world echoes and enacts the poet’s loss (p. 98). Pastoral elegies emphasize the role of the landscape in the work of mourning; they make the elegy a place-bound genre. The pastoral elegy’s landscape is populated by shepherds, sheep, and shady groves (locus amoenus); it is most often an idealized and abstract one, more resonant with classical pastoral works such as those by Virgil and Theocritus than with a specific location.

13 In her study of the pastoral elegy, Ellen Zetzel Lambert traces the opening invocation of “here” from Theocritus to Ben Jonson: “Here are oaks and galingale; here sweetly hum the bees about the hives. Here are two springs of cold water,” says one Theocri-tean herdsman to another. Later, Virgil’s Gallus invites his wayward Lycoris to join him in another pastoral retreat in much the same terms: “hic gelidi fontes,” he says, hic mollia prata, Lycori, / hic nemus; hic ipso tecum consumere aeuo” (“here are cool springs; here are soft meadows, Lycoris; here words; here with you only time itself would slowly waste me away”). And later still Ben Jonson’s sad shepherd speaks with the same accent, the accent of the pastoral: “‘Here! She wont to goe! / and here! and here! / Just where those Daisies, Pinks, and Violet’s grow.’” See Ellen Zetzel Lambert, Placing Sorrow: A Study of Pastoral Convention from Theocritus to Milton (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1976), p. xiv.

14 John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odys-sey Press, 1957).

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15 Susan A. Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 221.

16 Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), p. 100.

17 Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), p. 185.

18 William Wordsworth, “We Are Seven,” William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), ll. 43-44.

19 Tim Creswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Malden: Blackwells, 2004), p. 7.

20 Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1979 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), p. 223.

21 Although the apostrophe often appears in Romantic verse, it is more often directed at a specific object than an abstraction. Along with Shelley’s invocation to the West Wind, Wordsworth famously apostrophizes Milton in “London, 1802” (“Milton! Thou should’st be living at this hour” [l. 1]) and Keats’s odes apostrophize the Nightingale, the Grecian Urn, etc. Poetic invocations of such abstract concepts as Arnold’s “beauty, grace and charm” are more characteristic of Collins’ invocation to “Fancy, Friendship, Science, rose-lipped Health” in “Ode to Evening.”

22 This optimistic, albeit classist and patronizing account of the possibility that beauty and truth will reach and affect every part of the social order, lies at the heart of Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1867). Arnold’s concept of culture allows for “sweetness and light” to extend to the “masses,” no matter how unrefined individuals’ sensibilities may be: “culture works differently. It does not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes; its does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords. It seeks to do away with classes; to make them all live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely,—nourished and not bound by them” (Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson [Cambridge: Camridge Univ. Press, 1960], pp. 69-70).

23 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Adonais,” The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. Margaret Ferguson, et al. (New York, London: W. W. Norton, 2005), pp. 879-893, ll. 361-362, 363.

24 Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 2002), p. 23.

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