[6.] wild white horses. Breakers, whitecaps.
13. Margaret. A favorite name with Arnold. See Isolation and A Dream in this volume.
[39.] ranged. See note, l. [73], The Strayed Reveller. (wander aimlessly about.)
[42.] mail. Protective covering.
[p.166]
[54.] Why "down swung the sound of a far-off bell"?
[81.] seal'd. Fastened; fixed intently upon, as though spellbound.
[89-93.] Hark ... sun. In her song Margaret shows she is still keenly alive to human interests, temporal and spiritual. The priest, bell, and holy well (l. 91) symbolize the church, here Roman Catholic. The bell is used in the Roman Church to call especial attention to the more important portions of the service; the well is the holy-water font.
[129.] heaths starr'd with broom. The flower of the broom plant, common in England, is yellow; hence, starr'd.
In his work on Matthew Arnold, George Saintsbury speaks of this poem as follows: "It is, I believe, not so 'correct' as it once was to admire this [poem]; but I confess indocility to correctness, at least the correctness which varies with fashion. The Forsaken Merman is not a perfect poem—it has tongueurs, though it is not long; it has its inadequacies, those incompetences of expression which are so oddly characteristic of its author; and his elaborate simplicity, though more at home here than in some other places, occasionally gives a dissonance. But it is a great poem,—one by itself,—one which finds and keeps its own place in the fore-ordained gallery or museum, with which every true lover of poetry is provided, though he inherits it by degrees. None, I suppose, will deny its pathos; I should be sorry for any one who fails to perceive its beauty. The brief picture of the land, and the fuller one of the sea, and that (more elaborate still) of the occupations of the fugitive, all have their charm. But the triumph of the piece is in one of those metrical coups, which give the triumph of all the greatest poetry, in the sudden change from the slower movements of the earlier stanzas, or strophes, to the quicker sweep of the famous conclusions."