Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/115

 of the past are exhausted. But he would say that the poet who wrote only of the past, ignoring the present, would find that after a time his poetic enthusiasm would lesson [sic] and finally die away; or that he would be forced to introduce, probably unconsciously, modern feeling or a modern atmosphere into his record of the ancient subjects; or, at least, that he would bring the subjects nearer to us by mediævalising them, as Morris did the Greek tales. Moreover, he would certainly add to Greek or to mediæval tales, as both Morris and Keats did, the modern feeling for nature and the modern subtlety of passion. Try as he will, the poet cannot divest himself of the spirit of the time in which he lives. However, to support his point of view, Arnold chose some of the great stories of the past for poetic treatment. He took the fine subject of Merope, and made it into a drama in the manner of the Greek. He selected Sohrab and Rustum—a tale common to the Eastern, Teutonic, and Celt peoples. He folded in his net the story of Tristram and Iseult. He tried to put the Norse mythology and sentiment into the poem of Balder Dead. And then he went no farther into the great subjects of the past. The present seized on him. Having carefully laid down his theory of the greater excellence of the ancient subjects, he made three-fourths of his poetry belong to the age in which he lived. His great, his dominant subject, up to 1855 (New Poems was published in 1867), was himself face to face with his age.