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

Aging in Matthew Arnolds Growning former(a) 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 express their views on aging. Arnold suffers tremendously, for he lives in melancholy solitude with his deteriorating body, helpless in his moral and physical agony. Browning, a happier man, finds much joy in his climb on and comfort in the moral and spiritual strength which God gives him. In effect, while Arnold pessimistically dwells on the physical pain accompanying the aging touch and the inevitability of a cruel death, Browning devoutly expresses his optimistic 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 put down 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 forge 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 foreboding image of aging in line twenty-four, when he describes himself as being 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 effectively portray Arnolds suffering and discomfort to the reader, simultaneously lending to his overall pessimistic standpoint. In addition, Arnold experiences an absense of depression in accordance with his age. In the fourth stanza he declares that old age dies not imply gazing down on the world with rapt prophetic eyes and a heart profoundly stirred/ to call out and feel the fullness of the past. Furthermore, he writes, Deep in our hidden heart/ Festers the dull remembrance of a change/ But no emotion--none. One dilettante 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, in that respect was always the memory of that different world which Arnold had once known... (115). Most 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.