‘THYRSIS’ BY MATTHEW ARNOLD: SUMMARY, THEMES, AND CRITICAL ANALYSIS
“Thyrsis” by Matthew Arnold is a deeply moving pastoral elegy in which the poet, under the name Corydon, wanders the Cumnor Hills of Oxford, mourning his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, symbolically renamed Thyrsis. As he revisits their old haunts, he confronts not only personal grief but also the wider loss of youthful ideals and an England transformed by industrial noise and spiritual doubt. Yet amid the changed landscape, the enduring signal-elm and the memory of friendship offer a fragile but real hope that the “light we sought is shining still,” making the poem a powerful meditation on loss, change, and the quiet resilience of the human spirit.
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