Revolutions

Before man parted for this earthly strand,

While yet upon the verge of heaven he stood,

God put a heap of letters in his hand,

And bade him make with them what word he could.

And man has turn'd them many times; made Greece,

Rome, England, France;--yes, nor in vain essay'd

Way after way, changes that never cease!

The letters have combined, something was made.

But ah! an inextinguishable sense

Haunts him that he has not made what he should;

That he has still, though old, to recommence,

Since he has not yet found the word God would.

And empire after empire, at their height

Of sway, have felt this boding sense come on;

Have felt their huge frames not constructed right,

And droop'd, and slowly died upon their throne.

One day, thou say'st, there will at last appear

The word, the order, which God meant should be.

--Ah! we shall know _that_ well when it comes near;

The band will quit man's heart, he will breathe free.

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold (born December 24, 1822, Laleham, Middlesex, England—died April 15, 1888, Liverpool) English Victorian poet and literary and social critic, noted especially for his classical attacks on the contemporary tastes and manners of the “Barbarians” (the aristocracy), the “Philistines” (the commercial middle class), and the “Populace.” He became the apostle of “culture” in such works as Culture and Anarchy (1869). His literary career -- leaving out the two prize poems -- had begun in 1849 with the publication of The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems by A., which attracted little notice -- although it contained perhaps Arnold's most purely poetical poem "The Forsaken Merman" -- and was soon withdrawn. Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems (among them "Tristram and Iseult"), published in 1852, had a similar fate. In his poetry he derived not only the subject matter of his narrative poems from various traditional or literary sources but even much of the romantic melancholy of his earlier poems from Senancour's Obermann. His greatest defects as a poet stem from his lack of ear and his frequent failure to distinguish between poetry and prose. His significant if curious estimate of his own poems in 1869 was that they represented "on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century."

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