Matthew Arnold and Ger
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Matthew Arnold, in "Dover Beach" (1848?), and Gerard Manley Hopkins, in "God's Grandeur" (1877), are both concerned with the question of the presence of God or religious faith in the world. Neither poet actually asks a question, however, as Arnold sees the "Sea of Faith" withdrawing from the world, while Hopkins enthusiastically perceives God's presence in everything around him. Both poets, however, see human failure to appreciate God as part of the problem of their own times. But where Arnold sees the only option as withdrawal from a world with neither "certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain", Hopkins regrets the blindness of human beings who have come to dissociate themselves from God, even though He is always there in the world. A comparison of the two poems demonstrates not only the difference in their views of religion but the manner in which these conceptions influence their writing. Hopkins' struggle to express the inherent presence of God in everything is a very different kind of effort from the grand style in which Arnold formulates his view of the historical ebbing of faith and the massive indifference of the world. Trilling and Bloom speculate that "Dover Beach" may have been written as early as 1848 and that the "ignorant armies" could be a manifestation of "a very ambiguous attitude toward the third wave of the European revolution" (594). But, as Armstrong notes, Arnold's poems from the late 1840s through the mid-1850s often expressed, as in "The Schola
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n the crowd in contemporary society and the only hope is to withdraw from the fray.
Withdrawal is the choice Arnold makes in the poem as he suggests that the only, rather weak, hope for escaping the emptiness is the commitment the two people can make to "be true / To one another" (29-30). This decision contrasts strongly with the position that Hopkins takes in his poem "God's Grandeur." Hopkins, far from recommending withdrawal, is surprised and saddened by the human tendency to choose such withdrawal; a tendency that has increased sharply in his own times. This is the heart of the poem. Hopkins alerts the reader to the fact that God is everywhere in the world and that to ignore Him is foolish. But modern human beings have done so because they have come to live at a remove from the world around them. Humanity is insulated from this knowledge by its preoccupation with less important things--the incidental, man-made changes in the world that are called cultural progress. As Hopkins notes, humanity has lost touch with the very ground which "Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod" (8).
The desire to touch and to take in the world through all his senses, in order to experience the divine in the world, drives Hopkins to d
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Approximate Word count = 3033
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)
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