Matthew Arnold, ‘Requiescat’ (1853)

Strew on her roses, roses,
And never a spray of yew!
In quiet she reposes;
Ah, would that I did too!

Her mirth the world required;
She bathed it in smiles of glee.
But her heart was tired, tired,
And now they let her be.

Her life was turning, turning,
In mazes of heat and sound.
But for peace her soul was yearning,
And now peace laps her round.

Her cabin’d, ample spirit,
It flutter’d and fail’d for breath.
To-night it doth inherit
The vasty hall of death.

It’s beautiful. Does this elegy relate to any specific woman, or girl? We don’t know. Arnold scholar Miriam Allott thinks not, and considers it an exercise after the manner of Wordsworth’s ‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’: imagining how the poet would feel if a beloved girl died.

The tact and precision of expression here is extraordinary: a simple quartet of four-line abab ballad stanzas; the use of repetition (‘roses roses’, ‘tired tired’, ‘turning turning’) as expressive of the persistence of grief, its recurring echo in life; the elegant use not only of end-rhyme but rhymes connecting through the whole — so the opening term ‘strew’ is picked up by ‘yew’ in the next line (the conventional botanical expression of grief), the ‘quiet’ of line 3 is picked up, subtly, by ‘required’ in line 5, itself a verbal echo of the titular ‘requiescat’. That title, as you of course know, is the first word of the Latin phrase requiēscat in pāce (“may he or she rest in peace”), the subjunctive form of the verb requiēscō (“I rest, I repose”). ‘Mazes of heat and sound’ suggests she died of a fever. When alive she ‘bathed’ the world in her happiness; now she is dead peace ‘laps her round’. Alive, her little body ‘cabin’d’ (evoking Macbeth’s ‘cabined cribbed confined’) her large spirit; now that spirit occupies the ‘vasty hall of death’.

I’ve put the Cruickshank illustration of Little Nell’s deathbed at the head of this post, because I wonder if Arnold’s exercise in elegy wasn’t perhaps inspired by Dickens’s celebrated death. You can see Little Nell’s body strewn with flowers, and what looks like a sprig of yew on her pillow.

Yew is associated with death, on account of its toxicity (in the Gallic Wars [6: 31] Caesar tells us that Cativolcus, chief of the Eburones, poisoned himself with yew rather than submit to Rome) and because it is commonly planted in church graveyards. Roses, the flower of love, the royal flower of the houses of York and Lancaster, also has associations with death:

In our country, in some parts of Surrey in particular, it is the custom to plant roses round the graves of lovers. The Greeks and Romans observed this practice so religiously, that it is often found annexed as a codicil to their wills, as appears by an old inscription at Ravenna, and another at Milan, by which roses are ordered to be yearly strewed and planted upon the graves. It is the universal practice in South Wales to strew roses and other flowers over the graves of departed friends. We have seen, within these few years, the body of a child carried to a country church for burial, by young girls dressed in white, each carrying a rose in her hand. [Elizabeth Kent, Flora Domestica: Or, The Portable Flower-garden (1825), 364]

Byron describes a rose-bush planted at the tomb of Zuleika, at the end of The Bride of Abydos (1813):

Within the place of thousand tombs
That shine beneath, while dark above
The sad but living cypress glooms
And withers not, though branch and leaf
Are stamped with an eternal grief,
Like early unrequited Love,
One spot exists, which ever blooms,
Ev’n in that deadly grove —
A single rose is shedding there
Its lonely lustre, meek and pale:
It looks as planted by Despair —
So white — so faint — the slightest gale
Might whirl the leaves on high;
And yet, though storms and blight assail,
And hands more rude than wintry sky
May wring it from the stem — in vain —
To-morrow sees it bloom again!

The stalk some Spirit gently rears,
And waters with celestial tears;
For well may maids of Helle [that is, Greece] deem
That this can be no earthly flower,
Which mocks the tempest’s withering hour,
And buds unsheltered by a bower;
Nor droops, though Spring refuse her shower,
Nor woos the Summer beam:
To it the livelong night there sings
A Bird unseen — but not remote:
Invisible his airy wings,
But soft as harp that Houri strings
His long entrancing note!

A magic rose, it seems. I had read Arnold’s ‘strew on her roses’ imagining red petals, but perhaps they are white.