The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems

…Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849), combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic…

…Arnold, published in 1849 in The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems, the author’s first verse collection. The merman of the poem grieves for his human wife, who, after hearing the church bells at Easter, has abandoned him and their children to live on land among humans, never to return. The…