Writing around the middle of the 19th Century, just before the seismic shock waves of the Origin of the Species and Das Kapital, in a society still confident in its faith, the sensitive seer Matthew Arnold has detected a turn in the tide.
This is another treasure from English literature which will resonate with a Muslim reader, with its themes of ebb and flow evocative of the alteration of night and day mentioned in the Qur’an, sadness for what he sees as the the retreat of faith, and fearful for what it will be replaced with: the retreat of the bright girdle of the sea of faith at high tide will leave drear and naked pebbles, a loss of peace, joy, love, light, certainty and help for pain. The final image, of ignorant armies clashing at night, alone on a darkling plain recalls the violence and darkness of jahiliyyah – the pre-islamic period “age of ignorance,” whilst seeming eerily prescient of the world wars of the following century.
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Matthew Arnold
