The Buried Life by Matthew Arnold

First published: 1852, in Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“The Buried Life” is a ninety-eight-line poem divided into seven stanzas of varying length with an irregular rhyme scheme. A monologue in which a lover addresses his beloved, the poem yearns for the possibility of truthful communication with the self and with others.

The first line evokes the banter of a loving couple, but it is immediately checked by the deeply sad feelings of the speaker. Troubled by a sense of inner restlessness, he longs for complete intimacy and hopes to find it in his beloved’s clear eyes, the window to her “inmost soul.”

As the second stanza suggests, not even lovers can sustain an absolutely open relationship or break through the inhibitions and the masks that people assume in order to hide what they really feel. Yet the speaker senses the possibility of greater truth, since all human beings share basically the same feelings and ought to be able to share their most profound thoughts.

In a burst of emotion, expressed in two intense lines, the speaker wonders whether the same forces that prevent people from truly engaging each other must also divide him and his beloved.

The fourth stanza suggests that direct contact is possible only in fugitive moments, when human beings suddenly are aware of penetrating the distractions and struggles of life and realize that their apparently random actions are the result of the “buried stream,” of those unconscious drives that motivate human behavior.

In the long meditative fifth stanza, the speaker advances the idea that there are occasions in the midst of busy lives when people are suddenly overwhelmed with the desire to understand their “buried life,” the wellspring of all that they do. Yet no one ever seems to penetrate the origins of things and articulate what remains a mystery, what the speaker calls “nameless feelings.” There is a “hidden” aspect of life, an underground sense that haunts people, that beckons to them, just as, in the sixth stanza, the lover beckons to his beloved, taking her hand and expressing—if only for a moment—a sense of complete communion between themselves and their emotions. It is at these times that people become aware of the deeper currents of their beings.

The final stanza expresses the utter peacefulness of this communion between lovers, when they feel at rest, when they are no longer bothered by the elusiveness of their beings’ purpose and they comprehend the sources of their lives.

Forms and Devices

The poem is built around a central metaphor: the evocation of an individual’s life and of life itself as a stream or river, ever flowing, ungraspable, and possessed of great depths. In the first line, for example, the lovers’ conversation “flows”—a delightful and yet troubling metaphor because their words, like water, resist definition and do not reach the core of identity or meaning.

The poet uses the metaphor explicitly in the fourth stanza in referring to the “unregarded river of our life…eddying at large in blind uncertainty,” because human beings usually ignore the true roots of their selves.

The fifth stanza is even more explicit, as the speaker uses the phrase “our buried life” to parallel his use of “buried stream” in the fourth stanza. To track the “mystery of this heart,” to observe the “nameless feelings that course through our breast,” again continues the metaphor of the stream, the watercourse that contains within it unanalyzed elements. When the speaker evokes the moment of communion in the sixth stanza, it is also in the terms of water, as “a man becomes aware of his life’s flow.” Knowing his life’s basis is, as the last line of the poem suggests, similar to following the “sea where it goes.”

Comparing human lives to a stream, to the flowing of water, is a traditional metaphorical conception of human life, which Matthew Arnold uses to capture both the enigma and the energy of life. Even the speaker’s tears in the first stanza are an expression of this life flow—at once so soothing and troubling, so appealing and frustrating to human beings who wish to plumb the depths of their existence.

The poet also uses the device of a dramatic monologue, of a lover addressing his beloved, to generalize about human experience, to suggest that the lovers’ feelings are a microcosm of the feelings that all human beings share. Beginning with a dramatic scene—the speaker moved to tears and wishing that he could see in his beloved her “inmost soul”—the poem gradually, stanza by stanza, develops the universal import of the speaker’s feelings, showing how all human beings partake of this quest for self-knowledge and communion with one another.

Arnold also achieves an impressive unity in the poem by repeating certain key words—particularly those with which he evokes a “benumbed” and “jaded” world. This world is blind to the depths of things and distracted and deafened by its own surface affairs—by all the sounds and sights that obscure the quieter, softer, cooler forces at play in human nature, which are observed only at those rare moments of self-awareness. By implication, nature itself, its buried streams and its rising hills, evoke in the poem’s last lines a sense of life’s peaks and valleys, its origins and outcomes, that become apparent only in the lovers’ momentary transcendence of daily cares and expressions.

In the poem’s shift from first to third person, Arnold effectively transforms a personal, individual experience into a universal experience as well. For example, in the fifth and sixth stanzas, he moves from the speaker’s address to his beloved to a hypothetical situation in which “a beloved hand is laid in ours,” thus making his appeal to the human heart which, earlier in the poem (line 23), is described as beating “in every human breast.” When the tones of a lover’s voice suddenly open the beloved’s heart, “a bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast” (line 84)—a line of shocking visual force that describes a moment of unlocking the heart that the speaker had yearned for earlier in the poem (line 13).