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Home  »  The Poems of Matthew Arnold  »  Sonnets: To George Cruikshank, Esq.

Matthew Arnold (1822–88). The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 1840–1867. 1909.

The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems

Sonnets: To George Cruikshank, Esq.

ON SEEING FOR THE FIRST TIME HIS PICTURE OF ‘THE BOTTLE’, IN THE COUNTRY
[First published 1849. Reprinted 1853, ’54, ’57.]

ARTIST, whose hand, with horror wing’d, hath torn

From the rank life of towns this leaf: and flung

The prodigy of full-blown crime among

Valleys and men to middle fortune born,

Not innocent, indeed, yet not forlorn:

Say, what shall calm us, when such guests intrude,

Like comets on the heavenly solitude?

Shall breathless glades, cheer’d by shy Dian’s horn,

Cold-bubbling springs, or caves? Not so! The Soul

Breasts her own griefs: and, urg’d too fiercely, says:

‘Why tremble? True, the nobleness of man

May be by man effac’d: man can control

To pain, to death, the bent of his own days.

Know thou the worst. So much, not more, he can.’