In its call for two lovers to be true to one another, you could see this great poem as a distant 19th century cousin of Roman “carpe diem” poetry. It is as at least as bleak as anything that Horace wrote on that theme. We think of Victorian England as a society in which Christian belief and observance were enormously more predominant than today, so to us the picture of a world which has lost its faith is unexpected and striking.
The poet speaks the poem to his beloved: this, and the subtle and unobtrusive rhyme scheme, give it a conversational feeling, and he says what he sees and thinks in quite plain English. In the third stanza he looks back with apparent approval to a time when individuals’ place in the world was more simply defined by absolute faith, but in the fourth he seems to accept that that is no longer an available answer to the problems with which the modern world confronts him and his contemporaries. It looks as though at least part of him would like the clock to be turned back, while accepting that it won’t be. The comforting certainties of faith have been eroded, not least, perhaps, by freer and more questioning artistic and philosophical thought, of which, paradoxically, the poem itself is an example. Perhaps he is thinking about social and economic hardship and injustice in an age of seismic change, but the poem itself does not tell us. Similarly, what message he wants to convey about his own and others’ religious belief, and exactly what has prompted the devastating pessimism he finally expresses about the world, he does not tell us on the face of the poem.
That the world lacks joy and love is a problematic thing to say to your beloved, as the poet does in the last stanza. Perhaps these and the other lost comforts that he lists are something that he hopes to find in her, as he invites her to stand with him in facing a world which lacks them.
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