Remastered
Remastered reimagines classic and contemporary Oxford poetry with a delicious blend of music and visual art, made purely for pleasure. Step away from your day and enjoy a moment of the sublime. It's on the House. Remastered Vignettes 1-8 are curated by the Oxford Writers' House Podcasting Fellow, Isabel Galwey.
Remastered
Vignette Seven: Growing Old, by Matthew Arnold
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Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was a British poet, educator and literary critic. He was professor of poetry at Oxford from 1857 to 1867. His poetry was famed for its sparing lucidity and approachable, direct style, as in this bleak but evocative poem “Growing Old,” a meditation on mortality and the cold comfort of legacy.
Growing old by Matthew Arnold What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form, the lustre of the eye? Is it for beauty to forego her wreath? Yes, but not this alone. Is it to feel our strength? Not our bloom only, but our strength decay? Is it to feel each limb grow stiffer, every function less exact, each nerve more loosely strung? Yes, this and more, but not ah 'tis not what in youth we dreamed 'twould be. 'Tis not to have our life mellowed and softened, as with sunset glow, a golden day's decline. Tis not to see the world as from a height with rapt prophetic eyes and heart profoundly stirred, and weep and feel the fullness of the past, the years that are no more. It is to spend the long days and not once feel that we were ever young. It is to add immured in the hot prison of the present, month to month with weary pain. It is to suffer this and feel but half and feebly what we feel. Deep in our hidden heart festers the dull remembrance of a change, but no emotion, none. It is last stage of all, when we are frozen up within and quite the phantom of ourselves, to hear the world applaud the hollow ghost which blamed the living man.