| Description |
These lines from Matthew Arnold's "Buried Life" summarize the temperament and prevailing sentiment of the Victorian Age. The consuming desire to "know thyself" is the primary theme of the poetry of the "great Victorians"--Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold. Tennyson in "In Memoriam" goes through an agonizing search for his identity, and Browning's Cleon concedes that "man might live at first/The animal life," but then asks the torturing question, "But is there nothing more?" The tourist visiting the Grand Chartreuse exclaims, "What am I that I am here," while the whole monastery echoes with the whisper, "What dost thou in this living tomb?" |
