SOURCE: Bidney, Martin. “‘A Dream’ as Key to a Reverie Pattern in Matthew Arnold: Interactions of Water and Fire.” Victorian Poetry 26, nos. 1-2 (summer 1988): 45-60.

In the following essay, Bidney applies a Bachelardian “elemental” approach to fire and water images in Matthew Arnold's poetry.

Gaston Bachelard, in his work on the phenomenology of reverie, focuses attention on the power of the primal elements—earth, water, air and fire—to shape and animate recurrent patterns of epiphanic experience in the visions of major poetic seers.¹ Patterns of Arnoldian reverie have of course attracted the interest of many critics, and have been rewardingly studied from various points of view. A. Dwight Culler based a book on a three-part analysis of Arnold's archetypic River of Life, as it flows from the upper “forest glade” (youthful innocence and maternal security) through the traumatic “Gorge” of threatening transition to the “burning plain” (the...