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What Kind of a Poem Is Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis"? the Answer Has Seemed Self-Evident Ever Since It Was Published in 1

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What Kind of a Poem Is Matthew Arnold's What kind of a poem is Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis"? The answer has seemed self-evident ever since it was published in 1861: it is an elegy, more specifically a pastoral elegy, occasioned by the death of Arnold's friend and fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough five years earlier in Florence. "Thyrsis" is the third of the three great pastoral elegies in English poetry, the other two being Milton's "Lycidas" and Shelley's "Adonais." But is "Thyrsis" a pastoral elegy in quite the same way that "Lycidas" and "Adonais" are.7 Over forty years ago, Richard Giannone was not sure that it is: "Thyrsis' is something of an anomaly among pastoral elegies," he wrote. "One could justifiably call it a pastoral elegy manqué in so far as Arnold stops considerably short of the kind of complete shaping of the poem according to the pastoral conventions one finds, say, in Spenser's November eclogue or Astrophel, or in 'Lycidas.'"3 Yet no one has followed up on Giannone's questioning of the poem's genre, which continues to seem self-evident to critics. In his still influential study of Arnold's poetry, A. Dwight Culler distinguishes "Thyrsis" from "The ScholarGipsy," to which it is frequently compared, by stressing its different generic identity: "The Scholar-Gipsy," he says, is "primarily a Romantic dream-vision which creates an ideal figure who lives outside of time, whereas [Thyrsis'] is an elegy about a human figure who lived in time and was thereby destroyed" (p. 250). David Riede discusses "Thyrsis" along with "The Scholar-Gipsy" under the heading "Pastoral and Elegy,"4 and in the most recent commentary on the poem, Patrick Connolly reiterates the poem's dependence on the "long ancestral line" of pastoral elegy: "As a poem 'Thyrsis' falls within the pastoral elegy form, though this may not be obvious at first reading. Consequently it is dependent on a long ancestral line of such poetry from Shelley and Milton to Moschus and Theocritus."5 This unproblematic classification of "Thyrsis" as a pastoral elegy has ensured that critics, by never looking at the poem from an alternative generic perspective, see only what they habitually expect to find in pastoral elegies instead of seeing what Arnold actually wrote. "We often think of genre designation as one of the last acts a reader performs- and to some extent it is true that a work's precise generic placement is often unclear until we have finished reading it," says Peter Rabinowitz in Before Reading. "But some preliminary generic judgment is always required even before we begin the process of reading. We can never interpret entirely outside generic structures: 'reading'- even reading of a first paragraph- is always 'reading as.'"6 No poem, least of all one assumed to belong to so conventional a form as the pastoral elegy, stands "entirely outside generic structures," and so when we read "Thyrsis" as a pastoral elegy, it is difficult to avoid succumbing to the force of generic conventions, the recognition that it is one of a family of similar poems, and thus to be led very quickly from what the individual work is actually saying to what we assume the generic structure to which it belongs is saying through the work. On the other hand, there is no possibility of not reading intertextually, since no work exists entirely outside generic conventions. So the question "Thyrsis" presents, then, is not whether to read it intertextually- there is no choice other than to do so- but rather what poems constitute the most relevant and illuminating inter-texts? Or, to pose the question another way: what kind of poem is "Thyrsis" and in what generic tradition(s) does it participate? Without denying its indisputable affiliations with the pastoral elegy (with "Lycidas" as its most influential English representative) and with the broader pastoral tradition that "The Scholar-Gipsy" participates in, I propose to argue that the exclusive classification of "Thyrsis" as a pastoral elegy has prevented us from recognizing that it is, in fact, a generically mixed lyric that combines the conventions of the classical pastoral elegy with the new kind of poem we now identify as distinctively Romantic, the lyric genre that M. H. Abrams calls the greater Romantic lyric.7 Although the title and sub-title of "Thyrsis: A Monody, to Commemorate the Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough, Who Died at Florence, 1861" create the expectation of a conventional pastoral elegy, the poem (as Giannone perceived) deviates noticeably from the classical paradigm exemplified by "Lycidas." It might just as appropriately have been titled, in imitation of Wordsworth or Shelley, "Elegiac Stanzas Written in the Cumner Hills." For what had intervened between the classically inspired "Lycidas" and Arnold's mid-Victorian elegy is, of course, Romanticism, which changed forever the landscape of English poetry. Given Arnold's widely acknowledged complex relationship to the Romantic poets, it should come as no surprise that his mid-Victorian elegy follows, even while it modifies, the structural pattern of Abrams' greater Romanic lyric. As numerous critics have observed, "Dover Beach" is a later instance of that form, and Michael O'Neill has recently pointed out that "A Summer Night" "owes much to the structure of what M. H. Abrams calls 'the Greater Romantic Lyric.'"8 What has not been noticed, however, is how thoroughly Arnold has integrated the structure of the Romantic lyric into his "pastoral elegy manqué." Rather than approaching "Thyrsis" as the last example of a form on the verge of extinction, then, I propose to read it as a generically mixed poem, one that experimentally fuses what appear to be two incompatible genres. Although the elegy as a form has undergone renewed interest in recent decades, the position of "Thyrsis" in Arnold's poetic canon has declined over the same period. "During the past twenty years," says Melissa Zeiger in Beyond Consofótion, her study of the changing shapes of elegy from Swinburne to the present, "elegies have been more prolifically written, intensively studied, and resourcefully theorized than poems in practically any other traditional genre ___ Because of its privileged poetic status, elegy has been a primary site of critical renegotiation."9 This revival of interest in elegy as a "privileged" poetic genre has inexplicably overlooked, bypassed, or simply ignored "Thyrsis," which has received so little critical attention in recent decades that it seems doubtful whether it can still be regarded as one of Arnold's major poems. Peter Sacks is satisfied to give it only one and a half pages at the end of his chapter on Jn Memoriam in his major study of the English elegy.10 Even among Arnold's dwindling number of admirers, its position in his poetic canon has declined to the point that Alan Grob allows it less than a page in his recent study of Arnold's poetry, A Longing Like Despair: Arnold's Poetry of Pessimism (2002)." The only major analyses of it in the last twenty-five years are those by William E. Buckler in On the Poetry of Matthew Arnold: Essays in Critical Reconstruction (1982), by David G. Riede in Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language (1988), and by W. David Shaw in Elegy & Paradox: Testing the Conventions (1994).12 A likely explanation for the decline of the poem's reputation is the widespread feeling among critics that by the time Arnold came to write a pastoral elegy in the second half of the nineteenth century, the form was outdated. Alastair Fowler's speculations about the death of literary genres in his essay "The Life and Death of Literary Forms" are particularly relevant to "Thyrsis": "Does a genre die when it ceases to be used? Or when it is no longer regarded with interest? Or when readers become insensitive to its form?"13 Although the pastoral elegy was not quite dead in 1866, after Arnold the genre quickly slipped from the repertoire of major poets, and serious readers of poetry no longer regarded it with interest. "In an age in which the Great Western Railway roared ever closer to the very center of Oxford," writes John Rosenberg, "pastoral had become an endangered species, threatening to collapse into potted Wordsworth or reheated Keats" (p. 149). Although many pastoral elegies would later be written to mourn soldiers killed in World War I, not a single one has survived as a canonical Great War poem. Owen's bitterly ironic "Anthem for Doomed Youth" answers to the modern requirements of an elegy. Yeats, after composing a pastoral elegy, "Shepherd and Goatherd," on the death of Robert Gregory, implicitly acknowledged the inappropriateness of the form by quickly composing "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory." If, as Fowler says, "the pastoral eclogue could not survive changes in the relation of town and country that followed urban development" (p. 207), it has seemed obvious to many poets as well as critics that neither could the pastoral elegy. "The old consoling formulae," as Peter Sacks observes, "now [i.e., post-War] seem not only obsolete but hypocritical. Few poets of this century have even tried to write such a poem."14 One cannot imagine W. H. Auden writing his latemodern "Elegy on the Death of William Butler Yeats" (1939) in the antique form of a pastoral elegy, casting himself as Corydon and Yeats as Thyrsis. If, however, we cease reading "Thyrsis" only as a pastoral elegy and instead read it as a transformation of the pastoral elegy into a Romantic lyric, the poem will seem less like a "throwback" to an earlier, antiquated form and more like what in fact it is- a mixed genre that subsumes the pastoral elegy within a new lyric genre that had attained its definitive form only sixty years earlier.
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