Tristram and Iseult and other poems

Matthew Arnold wrote from a Victorian moment when certainties were crumbling, yet his poetry achieves a clarity that feels permanent. This collection gathers his most essential work: the dramatic retelling of the Tristan and Iseult legend, where love and betrayal unfold with restrained intensity; the immortal 'Dover Beach,' which captures the modern condition of standing alone before an indifferent sea; 'Thyrsis,' a pastoral elegy for a lost friend; 'The Scholar-Gypsy,' with its haunting quest across moonlit fields; and the early wonder of 'The Forsaken Merman,' where a merfolk wife waits for a husband who never returns to the sea. Throughout runs Arnold's deep engagement with Greek myth and Celtic legend, his elegiac awareness that older worlds are passing. These are poems of exile and longing, of the tension between what was and what remains. They speak to anyone who has felt the ache of beauty and the weight of time.