of stanza four. This speaker is “not quite alone” not only because he is distantly “touched” by “unmating things,” but also because he is “with” the “conscious thrill of shame” he has extracted from his desire. He carries this shame with him into his resolved movement into (homo)sociability, and it is this (if anything) that enlivens the otherwise dulled list of abstractions he claims engagement with. Shame, however, disturbs the claim these final stanzas make for the speaker’s resolved, disinterested sympathy.
To reiterate, it seems that isolation/desire has been replaced by renunciation/shame in order to carry the erotically charged subject into a paradoxically more human position defined by critical disinterestedness. This offers a version of Sedgwick’s position, which posits shame as at once a response to isolation and the motivation for its relief. However, the kind of sociability Arnold’s speaker finally enjoys clearly is not the fulfillment of the desire for the other; it is also not a bonding with the universal family of men. Arnold’s Empedocles will claim that by “being true / To our own only true, deep-buried selves,” we are “one with the whole world.” But here Arnold’s speaker achieves sociability only as continued isolation, signaled by the disdainful separation between the I who “loves” (if love) the happier men, and the happier men themselves. What we have to ask, as we look further into Arnoldian disinterestedness, is whether a shamed and shaming disinterestedness can be called disinterested at all. We have to ask if shame, employed here as a bridge not only into the social, but also back into the subject’s deep and desiring interiority, disrupts sympathetic distance as well as the “free play” of the critic’s mind. I will come back to this later in the chapter. For now I’d like to examine Arnold’s other well-known Marguerite poem in order to note the alternative to shamed disinterestedness that this second poem offers.
“To Marguerite—Continued,” like “Isolation. To Marguerite,” presents a narrative of unsatisfied desire. And, while this poem does not stage the movement from potentially transgressive desire into the social, it does posit the erotic as inherently isolating, and thus raises the problem of desire I have been discussing. In “To Marguerite—Continued,” the speaker’s distance from the object of his desire is itself, paradoxically, an eroticized substance. Rather than eroticizing the beloved’s body, the poet eroticizes the space that divides the lovers—a space figured here as water. While the poem might seem to describe a perpetual state of erotic frustration, its opening word immediately challenges this reading, for the “Yes!” that begins the poem might easily be inspired by the highly erotic language of the first stanza. The “echoing straits” are “between us thrown;” the lovers dot the “watery wild;” and as metaphoric islands they feel the “enclasping flow” of the sea. In contrast to the “remote and sphered course” of the speaker’s heart in “Isolation,” this language suggests a definite pleasure found in separation.l
If we read the poem’s opening line, “Yes! in the sea of life enisled,” as a syntactical unit, we find a clear expression of exaltation within isolation. The “Yes!” stands alone as its own sentence with the exclamation point providing a strong visual boundary between the word and what comes after. Furthermore, the trochaic meter of the line’s first foot, read against the following iambs, serves to deepen the isolation of this “Yes!”. This moment of exaltation is metrically and grammatically “enisled,” one might say, in the rolling iambic sentences that follow.
And this opening stanza’s final lines are telling as well: “The islands feel the enclasping flow, / And then their endless bounds they know.” To return again to Sedgwick’s definition of shame, the moment of disconnection allows for individuation. Separated from one another, these “islands” become aware of their own “bounds,” a word that suggests both individuation and skin. In Sedgwick’s words, “in interrupting identification, shame . . . makes identity” (36). And yet the sensing of the sea’s “enclasping flow”—this sensing of the boundaries of the self—is not, in this poem, shameful, though it is definitively erotic. Here, isolation, rather than resulting in cooled, frustrated, or shamed desire, heightens feeling.
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
