Aging in Matthew Arnolds Growning Old and Robert Brownings Rabbi Ben Ezra :: Matthew Arnold Growning Old Essays

ripening in Matthew Arnolds Growning Old and Robert Brownings Rabbi Ben Ezra Contemporaries of the Victorian Age, Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning wrote the poems, Growning Old and Rabbi Ben Ezra, respectively, to conduct their views on maturement. Arnold suffers trem interceptously, for he lives in melancholy solitude with his deteriorating body, helpless in his moral and physical pain. Browning, a happier man, finds much joy in his succession and comfort in the moral and spiritual strength which God gives him. In effect, while Arnold hopelessally dwells on the physical pain accompanying the aging process and the inevitability of a cruel death, Browning devoutly expresses his bullish outlook of old age and death as Gods consummate end to the labors of life. Arnolds pessimism regarding aging leaves no room for optimism. The reader encounters this negativity right away, for in the first stanza Arnold ascertains, in answer to his question What is it to grow old?, that aging involves losing the glory of the form. The words lose the glory implicate a tragic and perhaps humiliating experience. Furthermore, Arnold describes the loss of the glory of the form as a time when beauty forgoes her wreath, a phrase which presents the reader with the image of a queen abandoning her crown, as her time of glory ends forever. Arnold gives the reader another forecast image of aging in line twenty-four, when he describes himself as cosmos incarcerated by his age with the image of the hot prison of the present, month to month with weary pain. The words hot, weary, prison, and pain efficaciously portray Arnolds suffering and discomfort to the reader, simultaneously lending to his overall pessimistic standpoint. In addition, Arnold experiences an absense of feeling in accordance with his age. In the fourth stanza he declares that old age dies not imply gazing down on the human race with rapt prophetic eyes and a heart profoundly aroused/ to weep and feel the fullness of the past. Furthermore, he writes, Deep in our inscrutable heart/ Festers the dull retrospect of a change/ But no emotion--none. One critic concurs, stating that Arnolds age induces an emotional frigidity (Madden 115). Another critic describes Arnold as having an incapacity for feeling (Bush 50). As to the dull remembrance of a change Madden adds, There was always the memory of that different world which Arnold had once known... (115). most(prenominal) probably, the different world of which Madden speaks is Arnolds youth, of which the poet only has a dull remembrance left, suggesting that Arnold finds no fulfillment or feeling in the memories of his youth.