For an interesting fact connected with this poem, see next quotation and note.
(Thackeray has been describing how husband, wife, mother, son—each of the inmates of a household—is interested in his or her own separate world and looking at the same things from a different point of view.) How lonely we are in the world! You and your wife have pressed the same pillow for forty years and fancy yourselves united: pshaw! does she cry out when you have the gout, or do you lie awake when she has the tooth-ache?... As for your wife—O philosophic reader, answer and say, Do you tell her all? Ah, sir, a distinct universe walks about under your hat and under mine—all things in nature are different to each—the woman we look at has not the same features, the dish we eat from has not the same taste to the one and the other—you and I are but a pair of infinite isolations, with some fellow-islands a little more or less near to us.
Thackeray (Pendennis, ch. XVI).
The similarity between this passage and the preceding poem, written at about the same time, is very curious. Arnold’s poem appeared in 1852 but was composed ten years earlier, while Pendennis was published in monthly parts in 1849-50. Therefore, neither author would consciously know at the time what the other had written.
The incident is probably an illustration of the mysterious way in which minds influence one another and create the spirit of the particular age. There is, I believe, a Chinese proverb to the effect that we are more the product of our age than of our parents. This permeating quality of thought and feeling is, no doubt, the explanation why the highest art and literature, though often unappreciated at the time, become ultimately recognized. It appears not to be sufficiently taken into account in other directions. For instance, it is repeatedly stated that Blake, because of the limited circulation of his poems, exercised no influence on the Romantic Revival—see for example The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. XI, 201. Yet we know that his work was known to and appreciated by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Southey, and Hayley. (Although little regarded now, Hayley’s fame was then so great that he was offered and refused the poet-laureateship. He appears to be the one man who was an intimate friend of both Blake and Cowper.) While a very long period went by before Blake’s poems became generally known, their influence may well have been very great, permeating unconsciously through other minds. [See reference on p. 194] to the similar case of Fitzgerald’s “Omar Khayyam.”
Even if a poem were read by only one person, it might conceivably influence a generation of authors. Suppose, if that had been possible, a page of Swinburne’s “Tristram of Lyonesse” or F. W. H. Myers’ “Implicit Promise” (both quoted elsewhere) had been read by Pope or Dryden; how the monotonous heroic couplet of their time might have been transformed!
A child was playing on a summer strand
That fringed the wavelets of a sunny sea;