The second stanza continues to highlight the pleasures of solitude and longing as Arnold transforms the islands into erotically charged and melancholic bodies:
But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
(7-10)
Arnold then describes the nightingale’s notes, like the echoing straits in the first stanza, as “pouring” “from shore to shore.” In liquefying the nightingale’s song, Arnold again transforms space into fluid, transforms an entity that cannot be touched into one that can, and thus maintains his emphasis on the erotic sensations that arise out of distance. At the same time, these notes, like the straits above, seem to echo. Not only does Arnold rhyme “shore” and “pour,” but he also creates visual rhymes with all the “o’s” and “ou’s” in lines 11-12: “And lovely notes, from shore to shore, / Across the sounds and channels pour.” Echoing becomes in this poem a kind of spherical containment similar too, but more seductive than, the desiring heart’s spherical course in “Isolation.”
In the end-rhymes of the final stanza, “desire” is paired with “fire,” and “cooled” (desire) is paired with “ruled.” Arnold logically aligns desire with the unbound, the un-ruled, while the lessening of desire is aligned with boundaries, with God’s rules:
Who ordered, that their longing’s fire,
Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled?
Who renders vain their deep desire?
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.
(19-24)
However, as the poem as a whole makes clear, the simple binary where fiery unbound desire is contained or repressed by divine rules, is not, in the end, wholly accurate, because these very rules—the “order” that divides bodies and hearts—make desire palpable. In the final couplet, the verb “to be” is paired with “sea,” so that existence itself, the “Yes!” of life, is ultimately tied to the “wild” and “estranging,” and therefore arousing and isolating, sea. The melancholic bounded self is the desiring self, and yet desire is represented as boundless. Thus, “To Marguerite—Continued” suggests that the self-binding experience of desire might, in perpetually regenerating itself, ironically represent a kind of freedom.
Examining the poem’s final phrase, “The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea,” we find the strangely affective pleasure of estrangement continuing to shimmer. The “unplumbed” sea might yet be explored—the verb “to plumb” means not only to ascertain depth but also to fall vertically, and thus conjures an image of falling through water. Eventually the sea itself, that which divides the lovers, becomes the body of the desired other—becomes the object to be entered. The frustration of desire represented by the bound heart in “Isolation” is here a more welcomed sense of desire’s boundlessness. The desired object, always out of reach, opens a space, a gap into which the subject can, rapturously, fall.
I am suggesting that in this poem Arnold allows for a quite different definition of subjectivity than he allows for in “Isolation.” In that poem, the social world demands that desire be pressed aside or transformed into the more outwardly directing shame; the subject must carry his or her desire in the form of shame in order to engage productively with others. Here, in “To Marguerite,” unsatisfied desire is presented not as a mistake the speaker must fix in himself, but rather as an inevitable, and even welcomed, aspect of subjectivity.
But if Arnold is describing a subject that knows itself, knows its own “bounds,” via the (un)pleasure of constantly agitated (because unfulfillable) desire, what might this poem suggest about sociability? What might it suggest about poetry? Remember that in the second stanza, the nightingale’s song recalls the islands to each other; the nightingale’s song awakens the “longing like despair,” which in turn allows the islands to imagine their “marges” might “meet again.” While God has ruled the cooling sea to divide selves, a “divine” song draws them together. It appears, then, that poetry is given the ambivalent privilege of recalling subjects to desire. At the same time, we cannot avoid reading the “rules” of severance as, in one sense, prosody’s rules; Arnold’s strict iambic tetrameter, his unwavering rhyming and end-stopped lines, must be read in contrast to the liquefied notes that kindle desire. What we have then is a theory of poetry as itself enacting the paradox of distance and desire. If notes, like words, because of their liquidity, because of their ability to slide across the horizontal (metonymic) plane, suggest the boundlessness of desire, poetry’s rules, to which the “notes” are bound, suggest the limit, and thus the necessary failure, of that desire’s fulfillment.
Unlike in “Isolation,” where sociability is predicated upon the refusal of desire, here, poetry (ruled song) participates in, perhaps invents, a sociability that does not demand desire’s renunciation, but is instead built upon desire. That this sociability seems only “imagined” doesn’t have to mean it is doomed. For unlike the dreaming “happy men” of “Isolation,” these islands/lovers are fully awake. Arnold’s language of sensation renders them embodied, renders them as bodies in a manner the abstracted happy men can never be. The meeting of marges, occurring at the level of imagination and sensation, becomes the poem’s own “structure of feeling,” its gesture toward a future as yet unknown. Perhaps Arnold meant the island’s imagined reunion as a model for the eventual union of himself and his lover, Marie-Claude. But more generally it seems that in the poem’s celebration of desire in and through distance, we can find a homologous celebration of poetry’s paradoxical embrace of free play and limit, and that together these celebrations lead to the poem’s guarded expression of hope, its future-conditional: “Oh, might our marges meet again!”
To return now to the image of Luna gazing on Endymion in “Isolation”—here too we find a pairing of distance and desire, though with much less charge to the language. Here, too, space is rendered erotic, because without space, there can be no gaze; and yet, throughout “Isolation,” one finds a resistance to this arousing potential of separation. The self-shaming of “Isolation” enacts a refusal of Luna’s perpetually spinning and regenerating desire, a refusal too of the intensely erotic language of “To Marguerite—Continued.” In the context of Arnold’s other work, as we will see, it seems that shame is finally offered, instead of poetry, as the regulating “rule” which enables and demands a movement toward the social at the same time that it allows for a deep, desiring, though socially acceptable, interiority to persist. And yet, the alternative suggested by “To Marguerite—Continued,”—the alternative vision that, instead of shaming desire, recognizes its persistent paradoxical unpleasure as both motivating and marking the limit of intersubjectivity—this alternative will reopen in moments of Arnold’s prose and will speak for poetry as generative of this paradox, even as Arnold seeks for a more secure answer to the problems of desire, even as he seeks to limit poetry’s capacity to animate just this irony.
IV. The Poetics of Shame: Wragg
Arnold’s famous Preface of 1853 stages the central tension within the dilemma of desire that I am describing. This tension can be described most simply as an uncertainty about whether the subject (and thus the poet) is an isolated, “deep,” erotically charged unit, whether the subject is (or should be) a socially engaged citizen, or finally whether these two possibilities can be joined. In the Preface, Arnold seeks to resolve these questions by presenting a theory of socially responsible poetry. His claim, worth revisiting despite its familiarity, is first presented negatively: poetry