Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture

7. Shipwreck for a Poet

222 7 Shipwreck for a Poet To grasp just how the maritime imagination fostered the culture idea, it is important to see the story told thus far as the background to the portrait of one particular main theorist of culture: a theorist who, examined closely, turns out to be a figure in a seascape. This author’s genealogies, both literary and familial, tie him securely to the twin lineages of British Romanticism and British maritime empire. He grew into, or up into, an uncanny intimacy with the marine element. His grandfather, an official at the Isle of Wight at the end of the eighteenth century, patrolled the shore, “pursuing smugglers and collecting customs fees”—weighing out, quite literally, the freight of custom. His father revisited the seaside often in his life and in his writings, affording it allegorical significance in his amateur verse as the place where the river of life meets “the mighty sea!/Eternal life is there, Eternal Power,/Eternal Purity.” He himself, his biographer tells us, in his youth acquired a “marvellous oceanic identity.” As a child, his movements restricted by corrective leg irons, he garnered from his father the nickname “Crabby.” “O Crabby the great,” his father asked in one letter, “with all your Claws, reposing under the Shade of a large Sea Weed, and just going to catch the gentleman as he comes near you.—Do not you think that you will make a beautiful Picture?” The father’s fanciful image captures traits that would remain pronounced in the son’s later intellectual life: his would prove an amphibious mind, able in a flash to overcome its prized passiveness and grapple with the flow of life around it. As “Crabby” grew, he adapted the marine imaginary he inherited to his own purposes. He first explored it in juvenile poems. One set of verses, addressed to his mother on the eve of a voyage, asks “What naiad, then, what nymph presides/To shelter thee from wind and tides”? In another childhood poem, imitating the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (the work of another poet with a bad leg), he apostrophizes Italy thus: “In the depths of the sea/Where the Whale and the Dolphin are rolling in glee/Is stor’d thy never ending Fame.” He would subsequently compose a whole set of adolescent apprentice epics that use sea imagery to depict conquering armies or the vagaries of fortune. Then, while still in Shipwreck for a Poet 223 his twenties, he would write a succession of great lyrics so saturated with sea imagery that latter-day critics easily refer to him as a “poet of water.”1 A marine atmosphere suffuses Matthew Arnold’s major poetry, from “The Forsaken Merman” to “Dover Beach,” by way of “To Marguerite” and the coda to “The Scholar-Gipsy,” which likens that poem’s hero to a mysterious “Tyrian Trader.” From the juvenilia onward, it is apparent how largely the marine sensibilities showcased in Arnold’s poetry derive from the oceanic vision that Byron celebrates in Childe Harold and elsewhere. Arnold’s legacy from Wordsworth in this regard is less obvious but at least as revealing of the deep structure of Arnold’s poetry and prose alike. That Wordsworthian inheritance can be brought into focus with a look at what Arnold’s marine imagery owes not only to Wordsworth’s maritime imagination but also to that of Arnold’s father, Wordsworth’s younger contemporary and friend Thomas Arnold. The senior Arnold preceded his son in his interest in the Dover crossing , memorialized by Wordsworth in a group of 1807 sonnets and before then long a commonplace setting for narratives of spiritual trial by sea. For the Arnolds, this coastal locale of “rolling” waters came to emblematize the continual, recursive witness paid by the present to the past, according to their cyclical theory of history. Meanwhile, as one might expect, along with Wordsworth’s sonnets, “Tintern Abbey” finds echoes in the Arnolds’ writings. Thomas Arnold merges these Wordsworthian precedents in an 1837 travel journal entry published in the appendices to Arthur Penrhyn Stanley’s 1844 biography of him. Here, Arnold père, in presenting “Recollections of different visits to Dover,” reflects on how “Twenty and twentytwo years ago I was backwards and forwards at this place [Dover] . . . Ten, eight, and seven years ago, I used to be also passing through here . . . and I had a wife and children”—the eldest of whom was young Matthew.2 For Thomas, Dover...