Narrative Poems: ‘Amours de Voyages’ by Arthur Hugh Clough

Close Readings

This episode of Close Readings examines Arthur Hugh Clough's epistolary verse novel, 'Amours de Voyage', through the lens of the Victorian c

Key takeaways

• Arthur Hugh Clough resigned his Oxford fellowship because he could no longer teach Anglican doctrines in good conscience.
• The poem 'Amours de Voyage' is written in hexameters, a classical form that alludes to the ancient world within a modern setting.

Main topics

• Victorian crisis of faith
• Arthur Hugh Clough's biography

Notable quotes

Karlyle has led us all out into the desert... and he has left us there.

Conclusion

A profound look at how personal spiritual instability can be encoded i

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Hello. Of all the great Victorian poets, Arthur Hugh Clough best exemplifies that predicament for which the age was once most famous, the crisis of faith. This crisis long predated Darwin. It was the work of thinkers who are, I suppose, barely read now, writers such as Thomas Carlyle, for whom the old dogmas of Christianity were simply no longer sustainable. Speaker 2 (0:25) "'Karlyle has led us all out into the desert,' Clough said to the great American writer Emerson, "'and he has left us there.'" Clough had been a star pupil at rugby school, shaped by the bracing Christian regime of Thomas Arnold. He became a brilliant student at Oxford, and though, to everyone's surprise, he didn't get a first, he went on to be a tutor until, in the crucial year of 1848, he realised he could no longer, in good conscience, teach the doctrines of the Anglican Church as the job required. So, he resigned his fellowship and embarked on what became a rootless... peripatetic, in some ways rather disappointed life. In Thersus, his beautiful elegy to his old friend, Matthew Arnold describes him as a wanderer. He was someone who could keenly imagine a place of rest and security, but could never attain it. And in the end, in Arnold's reading at least, he was broken by the contested world. Yet hadst thou always visions of our light, and long with men of care thou couldst not stay, says Arnold, and soon thy foot resumed its wandering way. left human haunt, and on alone till night. First thing after leaving his Oxford post, Clough went to Paris, where he witnessed the revolution that led to the Second Republic, and the following year he found himself in Rome, in the thick of another revolution, this one a short-lived republican uprising against the Pope, which was finally squashed by the French. It is that Roman experience that quickly formed the basis of his greatest poem, Amour de Voyage, a verse novel which is full of Clough's rootlessness. It tells the story of a priggish young scholar from Oxford, Claude, clearly an unforgiving self-portrait, who is visiting Rome to look at the antiquities when the revolution blows up, led by Mazzini, defended by the charismatic Garibaldi. At the same time, a different sort of revolution takes place as the hesitant and rather superior Claude finds himself falling in love with another English tourist, Mary Trevelyan. The poem is cast in the form of letters. Claude writes to his pal Eustace, and Mary and her sister Georgina send their various news back home, including the news that they have met a strange, stiff young Englishman called Claude. And then everything becomes tangled up in the revolutionary moment. Welcome to the latest instalment of Close Readings. In this series, we're considering some of the great narrative poems written in English from the Renaissance. to the present day, poems that tell stories. And today, as I've already said, our subject is Clough's epistolary novel, Inverse, Amour de Voyage. My name is Seamus Perry, and I'm Master of Balliol College in Oxford, and I'm talking, as always, to Mark Ford, poet, critic, and professor of English literature at University College London. So, what we have here, Mark, is perhaps the greatest poem about that comparatively