Time, Aging, and Mortality in Arnold, Neruda, and Thomas

Introduction: Three Poems, Three Visions of Aging

"Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold, "We Are Many" by Pablo Neruda, and "Do Not Go Gentle" by Dylan Thomas each explore different understandings of time and aging. Each poem includes a set of observations — of the natural world, of the self, and of various ideas of dying men, respectively — and carefully weaves these observations into an attempt at understanding life and aging. Arnold attempts to understand a generalized notion of life and how to move through it as one gets old, Neruda attempts to understand his own life, and Thomas attempts to understand the life of his father.

Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach': Natural Rhythms and Historical Cycles

Matthew Arnold's free verse poem "Dover Beach" is often understood as an elegy for the slow wane of unshakable Christian belief in the nineteenth century. The narrator looks out across the Strait of Dover, acutely aware of the interrelated natural rhythms that surround him, including night (as opposed to day), the full tide (as opposed to low tide), the moon, and ocean waves. Though each of these measures of time — that of a wave, that of the tide, that of the night, that of a month — has its own unique periodicity, the narrator understands that they all share a paradoxically quivering slowness.

These natural rhythms are made most present for the reader through the similarly paradoxical sonic image of the beach pebbles roaring back to the sea, and through Arnold's anaphoral repetition of phrases used to illustrate this sound. The presence of myriad natural rhythms leads the narrator to reflect on the ebb and flow of human misery, as it did for Sophocles. In this regard, he places himself within a historical rhythm — the longest cycle of time in the poem. Sophocles, at the beginning of this time cycle, noticed the rhythm of the pebbles in the waves, as does the narrator now, at the end of this time cycle. It is perhaps a point of poetic conceit that nobody else was led to reflect on the ebb and flow of human misery in the interim. Between Sophocles and the narrator arose the slow rise and slow decline of Christian faith, which presumably offered a reprieve from the contemplation of misery. Although this is the longest time cycle in the poem, Arnold emphasizes its shortness in the face of eternity by describing it as "retreating to the breath of the wind" — the shortest time cycle in the poem.

In the final stanza, the narrator proposes to his love that the way to live in the world and to endure the various cycles of their lives is by eschewing the world, including that which seems beautiful and new, and being true only to each other. Only then can they perhaps avoid falling into the armies of humanity, fighting blindly about that which they have no true understanding.

Pablo Neruda's 'We Are Many': The Multiplicitous Self

Pablo Neruda's "We Are Many" is written by a man attempting to pin down and understand the nature of himself. He sees as many incarnations of himself as there are situations in which he has found himself. "We" is a quirky kind of synecdoche: usually the whole self is understood as the singular "I," but because Neruda is describing his singular self in terms of many incarnations, he renders the unified "I" as a plural "we." The multiplicitous "we" then substitutes for "I," which, for Neruda, is merely a part of the whole. Curiously, Neruda maintains the narrative integrity of his "I" while describing the multitude of the "we." Somehow the voice of the narrator is discrete from the collective, and yet the reader understands that all of the various identities — the speaker as well as those spoken of — are actually one person. Through this narrative device, Neruda manages to perplex the reader in the same way that he is perplexed by the various versions of himself.

While Neruda never states it overtly, this is clearly a poem of an older man. Neruda demonstrates a calm self-reflection that is born of experience. While he claims not to know himself, he in fact knows himself incredibly well. He has had many experiences with himself and is able to contemplate these experiences with distance and humility. The narrator has amassed an enormous collection of selves; collections take time to amass. And though he has an enormous collection of selves, in the first stanza he cannot find a single one of himself. The language of the first stanza could also be used to describe, for example, a pair of reading glasses that are "lost" on the forehead of the befuddled man looking for them. Moving from four lines in the first stanza to ten in the last, the poem gains momentum as it progresses. It is as though each stanza reminds the narrator of another infuriating aspect of his character, another instance of his selves slighting himself, and he cannot help but continue with further examples. These are the traits and habits of old people.

Conclusion: Helplessness and the Human Condition

Both narrators are helpless within their circumstances, and both succumb to their helplessness. In the middle four stanzas, Thomas engages a cool logic describing how other men would rage. In his final stanza, he commands "Curse, bless, me now." As the end draws near, he loses his coolness and begs for anything — any sign of emotional power still remaining. Similarly, Neruda wraps himself in his own conundrum at the beginning of his final stanza: "While I'm writing, I'm far away; and when I come back, I've gone." The problem of the elusive selves has begun to tie him up in linguistic knots. In this shared surrender, both poets reveal something essential: that confronting the end of life — whether one's own or another's — ultimately exceeds the power of reason, leaving only the raw cry of a human voice.