We have taken a break from the brutal heat by letting our poetry postings of the last few days take us on a trip to the beach. The ocean strikes primordial, spiritual chords deep within most of us, and the beach calls up childhood memories of sunny days, shells, and sand castles. Sometimes, though, it rains at the beach, and today we thought we’d post a melancholy beach poem.
The poem is 160 or so years old but could have been written last week. The changes wrought by modernity that destroyed Arnold’s romantic understanding of the world still trouble many today. Arnold himself was religious if not orthodox in his Christianity. In God and the Bible, he wrote: “At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.”
