Sunlight dapples the fields in one of the Lake District’s many valleys. The year 1849 was a difficult one for Clough. “This was without doubt the dreariest, loneliest period of his life,” wrote a friend, “and he became compressed and reserved to a degree quite unusual with him, both before and afterwards. He shut himself up, and went through his life in silence.” The grief that so poisoned his life was the constant pressure to think like those around him, something he found he was expected to do as much by ‘liberals’ as by ‘conservatives’.
SAY not the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,*
And, but for you, possess the field.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.*
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.*
* ‘Fliers’ are rapidly retreating soldiers.
* ‘The main’ is the sea, especially a broad expanse of sea.
* Clough means that looking to the future may bring more hope than looking only at the present, just as you can sometimes appreciate the morning sunrise better by looking on sunlit fields in the west than by looking directly towards the east.
Précis
During a particularly trying year, 1849, poet Arthur Clough encouraged everyone to persevere. Our hopes may have disappointed, but our anxieties may be just as false: tides change slowly but they do change, and just as we see the first light of dawn on distant hills, so we should look to the future to see our present gloom already lifting. (59 / 60 words)
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