Thyrsis: A Monody, to Commemorate the Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough

“The Buried Life” by Matthew Arnold (1852)

Just as “Thyrsis” looks back on and tries to recapture a more youthful, idealistic, and truthful perspective on life, the speaker in “The Buried Life” expresses regret for how people forget who they really are. As the pressures of life build up, they lose the ability to experience the depths of their own lives and fail to express their real feelings. They hide from themselves and from others, and this creates a feeling of melancholy. Only rarely, in a moment of love between two people, something happens—deep feelings stir again, the hurly-burly of day-to-day life recedes, and a man starts to know once again “The hills where his life rose, / And the sea where it goes.”

“Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold (1867)

“Dover Beach” presents the distressing consequences of the loss of faith in the modern world. As in “Thyrsis,” some vital element of life has gone missing, but unlike in the elegy, Arnold does not present it as something that can be recaptured in this poem. Now that religious faith is on the retreat, the world itself has “neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.