Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse

Matthew Arnold’s “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” takes its name from a seventeenth-century monastery in Grenoble in the French Alps, famous as the headquarters of the Carthusian order of Catholic monks. Arnold wrote this philosophical poem after visiting the monastery in the early 1850s. Comprised of thirty-five stanzas, each of which contains six lines of iambic tetrameter verse set to an “ABABCC” rhyme scheme, the poem is one of the better-known examples of Arnold’s early poetry. Part narrative, part philosophical musing and part dramatic monologue, the poem showcases many of Arnold’s favorite themes: self-doubt, alienation, and the struggle between faith and skepticism. Its fixation on ambiguity is thoroughly Victoria, but in its frank treatment of personal anxieties and self-doubt, the poem also prefigures modern lyrical poetry. Scholars consider Arnold (along with Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning) to be the last of the great Victorian poets. Arnold was especially adept at capturing the feeling of isolation that would define the modern and contemporary eras. In this respect, his writing is particularly prescient; in fact, Arnold can be considered as much of an early modern poet as he is a late Victorian.

In keeping with the theme of ambiguity, “Stanzas” follows a strict, classical form to express a modern, disenchanted sensibility. The poem is composed of thirty-five stanzas. Each stanza is composed of six lines of iambic tetrameter and follows the “ABABCC” rhyme scheme. Iambic tetrameter is a slightly unusual choice here; it is comprised of four iambic feet (where each “foot” is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable), unlike the more common five feet per line in iambic pentameter. The regularity and constraints of the meter mirror the poet’s chafing against the formal bounds of religion and skepticism. It also embodies a theme which would dominate Arnold’s critical works: the necessity to ground poetic practice in tradition. According to Arnold, the poet does not need to eschew formal and traditional structures to articulate a thoroughly modern predicament. The poem navigates its ambitious project of balancing past and future with a range of literary devices.

Poet Biography

Born on December 24, 1822 in England, Matthew Arnold was the eldest son of the renowned thinker and educator Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of one of Britain’s oldest independent schools, Rugby School. After briefly studying there, the sensitive younger Arnold was educated privately at home and went on to attend Oxford University. In 1851, he took an appointment as an inspector of schools to secure a steady income, a condition for marrying his long-time love, Frances Lucy Wightman. In 1857, he was elected professor of poetry at Oxford, a part-time appointment. Arnold died suddenly of heart failure in 1888.

Though he began his career writing poetry, Arnold became an extremely influential literary and social critic. He was known for his exploration of the role of poets in society, as well as definitions of what constitutes culture. Popularizing now common terms such as “philistines” (the anti-intellectual middle class), Arnold became the high priest of refined culture after he published his seminal book of essays, Culture and Anarchy, in 1869. Arnold established high and strict standards for good poetry and often felt his own verse failed to meet those parameters.

However, poems such as “The Forsaken Merman” (1849), “The Scholar Gipsy” (1853), and “Dover Beach” (1851, 1867) show Arnold has an invaluable place in the history of English poetry. His poetic and critical ideas influenced many prominent twentieth-century poets, including T.S. Eliot.

Poem Text

Arnold, Matthew. “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse.” 1855. The Poetry Foundation.

Summary

A guide leads the speaker and his companion through crocus-rich alpine meadows into a rocky path up the mountains. The landscape turns from romantic to bleakly beautiful as the party climbs higher. As the autumn evening darkens, the wind picks up and it starts to rain. From the valley below, the speaker can hear the eerie sound of a stream. Fog envelops the woods like smoke blanketing a bubbling cauldron. Through the racing mist, the speaker catches sight of “ragged pines” (Line 14) dotting ravaged mountainsides and the huts in the valley of Courrerie. The guide’s sharp exhortation to turn left breaks the speaker’s reverie. Higher the stony path winds till finally, the encircling forest gives way, revealing “pointed roofs” (Line 23) through the grey twilight.

The speaker wonders if the steeples belong to the palace of the King of France, but no, they are the steeples of the party’s destination, the Grande Chartreuse monastery. The group has a quick supper, rests in the outhouse briefly, and opens the gate to the “Carthusians' world-famed home” (Line 30).

Enclosed in silence, the Carthusian monastery is a place of “stern and naked prayer,” (Line 30) where the monks carry out intense rituals with deep concentration. They kneel on the floor of the abbey in penitence for their sins, then rise and pass the host from hand to hand—the host being the consecrated wafer or bread in the Christian mass or communion, signifying the body of Christ. After the ceremony, the monks bury their pale faces in their cowls once again. At night they sleep in narrow wooden beds, which shall double as their coffins when they die.

The library of the monastery is austere as well, free of manuscripts which might stoke priestly egos or provide amusement. Instead, the books contain accounts of the spiritual agonies of various monks and saints. On the other hand, while the garden is overgrown, it is filled with fragrant herbs and flowers. Laboring under the sun in the garden is the only pleasure afforded to the monks.

As the speaker surveys the monks and the monastery, he suddenly asks an abrupt question: “And what am I, that I am here?” (Line 66). Unlike the monks, the speaker is areligious. He laments that he was “purged” (Line 68) of his faith by his rationalist and scientific education. The skeptical voices of his teachers now seem to pierce his thoughts, questioning his presence in the “living tomb” (Line 72) of the monastery. The speaker addresses the “masters of the mind” (Line 73) who have inspired him, seeking their forgiveness. He does not deny atheism; rather, he grieves a lost tradition. Like a Greek traveler is reminded of his own lost Gods when he observes the ruins of pagan Scandinavian culture, the speaker too observes the dying tradition the monks embody.

The speaker now confronts his own lack of faith. Though his rational mind keeps him from participating in organized religion, he misses being part of a tradition. Caught between the past and the future, the speaker feels forlorn. He wishes the hooded monks would envelope him protectively till all doubts within him vanished. The speaker’s agony is intensified by the fact that rationalist scholars would deride even his mourning of the loss of religion. Even the “nobleness of grief” (Line 107) is lost in the cold light of reason. A part of the speaker wishes he could stay forever in the monastery and die like the dying religion of the monks.

The speaker now refers to the ancient Greek hero Achilles, who in Homer’s Iliad retreated to his tent when he could not prevail against his lord, Agamemnon, on whose side he fought in the siege of Troy. Like Achilles withdrawing from action, the “kings of modern thought” (Line 116)—the thinkers and leaders of the speaker’s time—are stuck in inaction, placing their hopes on an imagined future. The speaker wonders if present-day humans, blessed with scientific and technological progress, are in fact better off than their ancestors. Are they happier? He does not know the answer.

Does it matter now that great Romantic-era poets like Lord Byron (Lines 133-8) and Percy Shelley (Lines 139-44) created poems alive with passion and joy? The poets are long dead, and the world mourned them only briefly. Moreover, modern poets have inherited their predecessors’ lyrics, but not their passion. The speaker feels kinship with the French novelist Étienne Pivert de Senancour’s character Obermann, whose existentialist angst drove him to despair and self-imposed exile. He wishes his own longing for the past could die like Obermann in the novels, but nostalgia continues to haunt him.

However, the speaker must shrug off his melancholy mood. He hopes future generations will strive for moderation: Attaining knowledge without rigidity and happiness free from flippancy. He applauds these yet-to-be born heroes who will reorder the world—but their time is not now (Lines 157-62).

The speaker returns to the pessimism of the present. For the moment, he and his generation, as well as the Carthusian monks, are caught between faith and the rise of modernity. The speaker and the monks are like children raised in the shade in an enclosed, forgotten monastery. He imagines a medieval-era tableau: Two parades, one of soldiers, and the other of merrymakers and happy maidens, passes by the children. The children are intrigued by the celebrations, but locked in a static tradition, they cannot respond to the inviting calls of the merrymakers. They tell the revelers that they are saplings which cannot be transplanted into foreign soil; they must remain in the stasis of the monastery. The revelers should pass and leave them to their “desert” (Line 210). Thus, the speaker and his generation respond to the call of the future.