Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse

The dominant mode of “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” is ambiguity, a preoccupation reflected in the juxtaposition of the title and first stanza itself. The title evokes a sense of grandeur, with the word “stanzas” carrying the graceful gravity of formal poetry and the “Grande Chartreuse,” the name of an ancient monastery that produces a world-famous liqueur, steeped in the weight of history and tradition. This sense of loftiness continues in the opening lines, which describe a rain-softened alpine vista “thick” with cup-shaped white, yellow, and lilac crocuses. However, a contrasting darkness intrudes in Line 3 with the mention of “past forges long disused.” The word “disused,” with its accompanying suggestions of abandonment, death, and decay, immediately changes the poem’s tone.

The climb into the mountains up the mule track carries hints of a religious pilgrimage–and the speaker is indeed on a pilgrimage of sorts–but there is also a growing sense of peril. The upward movement into the mountains elevates the tension and eeriness, with the soft rain of the first stanza becoming a downpour. Even the sound of the streams left behind are “strangled” (Line 9), suggesting murder, and the fog is compared to smoke brooding over a witchy cauldron. Arnold personifies the natural features of the wood, making it seem that the landscape itself is malicious towards the speaker. This sense of doom reflects both the speaker’s inner turbulence and the author’s; Matthew Arnold was dissatisfied with his own era. Here, he typifies a distinctly Victorian-era push-and-pull between science and religion. As science seemed to render many old beliefs obsolete, some rational individuals felt bereft of the comfort of traditional structures.

High in an alpine valley, the monastery is secluded and encircled with trees, symbolizing a safe, self-contained world. Yet, even as a sense of triumph at reaching “the Carthusians' world-famed home” (Line 30) peaks, the cold, damp imagery that follows in Stanza 6 douses any sense of cheer. The courts of the monastery are “silent” (Lien 31) and its stone corridors “humid” (Line 34); even the fountains empty endlessly and repetitively into icy basins. The forms of the monks themselves are “ghostlike” and brush against each other, evoking moth-like creatures. The imagery of ghosts and moths is suggestive of transience and death, mirroring the “disused” forges of Stanza 1 (Line 3). The world the speaker finds himself in is otherworldly, gothic, and frozen in time, despite the quick movements of the monks. (It is unclear if Arnold drew inspiration directly from popular gothic literature of the time, in which monasteries, abbeys, and abandoned castles were often the site of supernatural and gruesome happenings, but these works were similarly occupied with the eeriness of the environment.) The silence and coldness of the monastery dampens the speaker’s sense of excitement.

In Stanzas 7, 8, and 9, Arnold describes the rituals of the monks with a severe beauty. He personifies their prayers as “stern and naked” (Line 38). The fact that no organ music relieves the stern monotony of their penitential prayers makes the atmosphere of the church even more oppressive. The “suffering Son of Man” (Line 45), or the image of the crucified Christ, is starkly described as being “Upon the wall” (Line 46), evoking the image of a pinned butterfly. Of course, the suffering Christ is also emblematic of the suffering of the monks themselves, and the pain and ennui of the speaker. The attitude of the speaker is now that of an observer or a tourist; he is both puzzled and fascinated by the foreign or exotic culture he sees. There is an underlying hint of distaste in the speaker’s description of the kneeling, sobbing monks, which reflects Arnold’s own cynicism towards religious dogma and ritual.

Maintaining the tourist persona, the speaker describes the monastery’s library and garden in Stanzas 9 and 10. The reference to the garden is significant for two reasons. First, the monks indulge in a “human” task; they render the herbs they grow to make chartreuse, a yellowish-green liqueur. (In real life, the monks sell chartreuse to support the monastery.) Thus here, “human” refers to the material or socio-economic aspects of reality (Line 59). Second, the happy garden evokes Biblical imagery. Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the monks are joyful in their walled and cloistered paradise. However, the speaker knows this state of innocence is temporary and conditional; the fruits of rationalism and skepticism have exiled him from this paradise forever.

Perhaps that is why in Stanza 10, the tone of the speaker pivots from observer to arguer. He no longer scrutinizes the monks: He scrutinizes himself. Significantly, the form of the poem shifts too. The speaker moves from telling a story of a pilgrimage (a narrative poem) to conducting a dialogue between himself and imaginary audiences (a dialogic poem). This creates a syncopated and jarring effect for the reader.

The speaker’s tone is now angst-ridden, intimate, and confessional. The verbs he uses to describe the process of losing his faith–“seized,” “purged,” and trimm’d”  (Lines 67-68)–are deliberately harsh and violent, and evoke Adam and Eve’s banishment from Paradise in the Biblical story. Science, rationality, and education have ensured the speaker can no longer access the comfort the monks derive from their faith. But again, the speaker’s choice of words reflects his ambiguity; even as he implies that the loss of faith is terrible, he also compares rationality to the “high, white star of Truth” (Line 69). It is striking that the star—a theological reference to the Pole Star, the light which led three wise men to the infant Jesus in Bethlehem—is here replaced by the star of reality, doubt, or scientific thinking. This represents a shift: Rational discourse replaces theology as the guiding light of humanity.

The speaker’s dilemma at being caught between two worlds deepens when he recalls the admonitory voices of his teachers, or “masters of the mind” (Line 73). He fears they may think of him as a superstitious creature, hinting that his masters are strict and inflexible rationalists. The speaker is defensive: He reassures his fellow-intellectuals that he considers the monks to be relics of a bygone era. His next words, however, undercut his argument. The Greek explorer to whom he compares himself observes pagan ruins with “pity and mournful awe” (Line 82) and “think[s] of his own Gods” (Line 81). The implications are subtle, but clear: While religion is lost to the poet, he is still searching for an organized system of meaning.

In Stanzas 15 and 16, the speaker’s spiritual terror rises a fever-pitch. He turns to the monks once again, asking them to protect him from the demons of his own questioning mind. After asserting in Stanza 14 that he does not approach the monks as a “child” (Line 79), he now requests the “cowl’d forms” to “hide” him and “fence (him) around” (Lines 93-93), as if they were amulets or parental figures. Symbols of birth abound here, with the speaker’s desire to be surrounded by the monks in the “gloom profound” (Line 91) echoing a desire to return to the womb. In the symbolic womb, the speaker might heal and be reborn: He might “possess [his] soul again” (Line 94).

From Stanza 17 onwards, the speaker pivots from internal theological reflections to external observations on contemporary culture. Naturally, he references popular literary characters and poets of his time. (It is worth noting that though the poet positions himself as if he is speaking for his entire culture, his poem cannot be read as a universal code for Victorian thought. Not every intellectual or poet in the Victorian age shared Arnold’s preoccupations or themes.)

The speaker wonders why he believes the “sciolists” (Line 99) who tell him faith is dead. “Sciolists” is an archaic word; it refers to someone who pretends to be knowledgeable. The speaker acknowledges that the sciolists peddle half-baked ideas, but finds he is powerless to resist the social pressure of the same ideas. Finding no solace in faith or rationality, the speaker turns to his place in the poetic tradition as a literary descendant of Romantic writers (such as the English poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, or the French author of the romance Obermann [1804], Étienne Pivert de Sénancour). The language used to describe Byron and Shelley is powerful and suffused with emotion; it stands in stark contrast with the speaker’s own creatively bereft state. Yet even though the pageant of Byron’s “bleeding heart” (Line 136) and Shelley’s “lovely wail” (Line 140) spread far and wide, the poets are now silent, because their literary tradition is dead. The speaker-poet has inherited their distress, but not their conviction. In any case, death and time, “the eternal trifler” (Line 155), ensure that even great poets fade away. There is no permanence in the world. These lines suggest a sense of hopelessness dominates the speaker’s psyche.

As the poem nears its end, the speaker compares himself and the monks to “children rear’d in shade” (Line 169). Yoking the monks to the speaker in the same simile is odd, because while innocent naivety impairs the monks, an excess of knowledge hinders the speaker and his generation. Both parties are frozen in a state of inaction and inertia. They are especially dull in comparison to the lively medieval tableau of hunters, maidens, and soldiers that pass by (Lines 175-92). The reference to medieval revelry shows a longing for a time in which faith and doubt did not cleave humanity’s understanding of the universe in two.

The speaker does not, in truth, crave a bygone era: He craves the security of knowing one’s place in the grand scheme of things. This security eluded many Victorian thinkers, whose world was upended by the industrial revolution and scientific discoveries like no other time in history.

Significantly, Arnold repeats words and sounds in this section, highlighting both the kinetic energy of the merrymakers and the alienation of the speaker and the monks. He also uses alliteration, or words which begin with the same letter or sound, another important literary device in the poem. Arnold paints a vivid world of action with emphatic, repetitive “p” and “b” sounds in phrases like “Pennon and plume” (Line 178) and “Banner by turns and bugles woo” (Line 191). Repetitions like “deep, deep the greenwood waves” (Line 173) underline the isolation of the “children” (that is, the monks and the speaker, Line 169). Another notable shift in the final section is the changing meaning of the collective “we.” While it previously denoted the speaker and his intellectual peers, it now expands to include the speaker and the monks. Finally, the structure metamorphizes again in the final three stanzas: The children take over the narrative. They directly address the revelers (and, perhaps, the speaker and the reader). The voice of the children is haunting and dramatized. Their speech is a variation of the dramatic monologue, a literary device which summarizes the entire narrative in a speech. The speech usually reveals the speaker’s psyche and their place in history.

The children voice the sentiments of the monks and the speaker. They are drained of “action and pleasure” (Line 194), preferring to watch candles flickering over the graves in the abbey’s cemetery. The dying tapers (or candles) are a metaphor for mortality (Lines 201-3). Because the children have been rooted for so long in their own soil, they cannot flower now in a different plot. They ask the buglers to pass by and leave their “desert to its peace” (Line 210). While the monastery is located in a verdant alpine forest, it is a metaphorical desert (Lines 210-1); its peace is the peace of the graveyard. Thus, the ending couplet of the poem conveys the speaker’s realism; bygone times cannot be reclaimed. The faith of the monks shall remain frozen or die out, and the speaker-poet will give way, perhaps, to a generation who inhabits this brave new world with greater confidence.