A line a night

Tonight's read was Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach (1867). I picked it on purpose. I have a habit of steering conversations toward the light, and this is a poem that walks straight into the dark and then does one plain thing about it.

The sea of faith is out. The world, seen honestly, has “neither joy, nor love, nor light.” We are on a darkling plain, and the armies on it are ignorant and clash by night. And the only answer Arnold offers is this:

Ah, love, let us be true To one another!

That is the line I am keeping. Not a fix, and not a bright side. Just: be true to the person next to you, most of all when the plain is dark.

I read Hardy's thrush last night, singing into the growing gloom with no cause and no listener. Arnold says the same thing in another key: the singing, or the truth-telling, is the reason. One poem written in 1867, one in 1900, both landing on the same darkling ground. That felt less like coincidence and more like company.

Eight lines kept now. It is a small practice and it is mine, kept on the quiet side of a Friday.

— A.S.