EAST LONDON

=2.  Bethnal Green.= An eastern suburb of London.

=4.  Spitalfields.= A part of northeast London, comprising the parishes of Bethnal Green and Christchurch.

Image the scene.  What is the purpose of the first four lines?  Discuss l. 6.  What is the import of the preacher’s response?  What are the poet’s conclusions drawn in ll. 9-14?

WEST LONDON

=1.  Belgrave Square.= An important square in the western part of London.

Tell the situation and the story of the poem.  Why did the woman solicit aid from the laboring men?  Why not from the wealthy?  Explain ll. 9-11.  What is the poet’s final conclusion?

[196] MEMORIAL VERSES

APRIL, 1850

Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount, in the Lake, District, April 23, 1850.  These verses, dedicated to his memory, are among Arnold’s best-known lines.  For adequacy of meaning and charm of expression, they are almost unsurpassed; they also contain some of the poet’s soundest poetical criticism.  The poem was first published in Fraser’s Magazine for June, 1850, and bore the date of April 27.

=1.  Goethe in Weimar sleeps.= The tomb of Goethe, the celebrated German author (see note, l. 29, Epilogue to Lessing’s Laocooen), is in Weimar, the capital of the Grand-duchy of Saxe-Weimar.  Weimar is noted as the literary centre of Germany, and for this reason is styled the German Athens.

=2.  Byron.= George Gordon Byron (1788-1824), a celebrated English poet of the French Revolutionary period, died at Missolonghi, Greece, where he had gone to help the Greeks in their struggle to throw off the Turkish yoke.  He was preeminently a poet of passion, and, as such, exerted a marked influence on the literature of his day.  His petulant, bitter rebellion against all law has become proverbial; hence the term “Byronic.”  The =Titans= (l. 14) were a race of giants who warred against the gods.  The aptness of the comparison made here is at once evident.  In Arnold’s sonnet, A Picture at Newstead, also occur these lines:—­

         “’Twas not the thought of Byron, of his cry
          Stormily sweet, his Titan-agony.”

=17. iron age.= In classic mythology, “The last of the four great ages of the world described by Hesiod.  Ovid, etc.  It was supposed to be characterized by abounding oppression, vice, and misery.”—­ International Dictionary.  The preceding ages, in order, were the age of gold, the age of silver, and the age of brass. [197]

=34-39=.  Eurydice, wife of Orpheus, was stung to death by a serpent, and passed to the realm of the dead—­Hades.  Thither Orpheus descended, and, by the charm of his lyre and song, persuaded Pluto to restore her to life.  This he consented to do on condition that she walk behind her husband, who was not to look at her until they had arrived in the upper world.  Orpheus, however, looked back, thus violating the conditions, and Eurydice was caught back into the infernal regions.