The Last Word
Creep into thy narrow bed,
Creep, and let no more be said!
Vain thy onset! all stands fast.
Thou thyself must break at last.
Let the long contention cease!
Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
Let them have it how they will!
Thou art tired: best be still.
They out-talked thee, hissed thee, tore thee?
Better men fared thus before thee;
Fired their ringing shot and passed,
Hotly charged—and sank at last.
Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall!
We've all been there: backs up against the wall, dragged into an argument that appears to have no end. We know we're right, we've stated why and can't understand why the people around us aren't listening! The words go back and forth until the actual point is lost. We just want to have the last word.
Arnold has some advice for us. He begs us to rise above the altercation. "Creep" into bed, he commands, as if this was the early morning and we were dead tired. "Creep" also implies a need to submit ourselves to the humiliation of giving up. But why not give up when triumph is impossible? "All stands fast" means that no one will budge an inch. We must "break at last," but better to bend, to buckle under and tactically retreat, than break down entirely.
The need for peace overcomes the need to be proved right there and then; conversely, proving ourselves right by shouting the loudest is counter-productive. The "long contention" must cease even if we have to yield to other people's irrationality. Arnold's description of hissing and tearing evokes the verbal cruelty of intellectual wits while suggesting they're little better than snakes or cats. What they believe may be as foolish as claiming that "geese are swans" but they're hardly going to admit it. He implies the truth will show itself when the time is right.
Arnold cautions us that "better men" than ourselves have been in the same position; braver men who have "fired their ringing shot" and still been "sunk." I wonder if in the description of those who passed by "hotly charged" and lost, there is a punning reference to the ancient battle of Thermopylae (literally "the hot gates"), most recently depicted in the film "300." Here a tiny number of Greeks defended a mountain pass but were eventually slain by invading Persians.
In the final stanza, as if we had refused Arnold's advice and sworn to continue, he cries out in exasperation, "Charge once more, then, and be dumb!" In other words, "Go on then, have one more try and be silenced forever." The references to "forts of folly" and the "body by the wall" depict this battle as a siege, where the righteous few challenge the proud citadel of the many.
I think Arnold may be harking back to another ancient conflict, this time the siege of Troy described in Homer's epic poem "The Iliad." In a way, Arnold plays Achilles to our Patroclus. In the saga, the former advises the latter to turn back once his mission to protect the Greek ships from the Trojans is accomplished. Yet Patroclus doesn't listen. Drunk with his own success, he presses on and is slain by his enemy Hector beneath the wall of Troy. This proves to be a turning point, because Achilles is so shocked by his friend's death that he reconciles with his fellow warrior Agamemnon and, in unity, they defeat their enemies. Troy falls.
How does this translate into an everyday situation? Perhaps we can say that when the immorality of those who seek to bully others into submission is exposed, their power is effectively over.
Of course, the tone here is not at all serious; the comparison between the battlefield and the war of words in the Victorian drawing room is arch and playful. Yet in making us laugh Arnold makes us see that human psychology has remained unchanged for millennia, though we may have moved on from the pickaxe to the put-down. Indeed, the drawing room could be the modern office, with its political maneuvering, whispery cabals, and skullduggery behind the smiles.
It's the universal story of the individual against the group. The staunch defender of simple truth, for whom geese are happily geese and not anything more, is met by the splenetic venom of "them"—a shadowy elite, for whom truth is little more than a language game. But, as Arnold reminds us, truth is so much more important than being clever or powerful; and the real hero is the one who has the quiet confidence to turn the other cheek.
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was an English poet and cultural critic. Christopher Nield is a poet living in London.
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