Matthew Arnold’s “The Church of Brou”: Precariousness, Distress, and a Pursuit of Spiritual Enhancement

This article investigates how Arnold’s “The Church of Brou” manifests his thematic concerns with vicissitude of human felicity, tribulation necessitated by it, and his resilient search for attaining spiritual fortification so as to overcome such apparent sensitivity to predicament. In the intertwined structure of three sections, “The Castle,” “The Church,” and “The Tomb,” the author unravels the ironic loss and deprivation of one’s longing for the private and religious realms of ideal goals. As in his early poems, Arnold sustains his prominent issue of man’s tribulation which registers dilemmatic conflicts between his stoical resolution and its opposing threats. However, the unique features of “The Church of Brou” underlie its diverse range of treating poetic objects which bring about the paradoxical facets of mutable occurrences. The poem prefigures subsequent elegiac poems and prose works in which Arnold embodies an ardent quest for immortality of man’s spiritual faculty, whereby he can liberate himself from the sustaining perceptions of the irresolvable predicament.