Lionel Johnson and Arthur Hugh Clough: An Ironic Debt?

Beginning of article

 
A BURDEN OF EASTER VIGIL 
 
 
       AWHILE meet Doubt and Faith: 
       For either sigheth and saith, 
                 That he is dead 
   To-day: the linen cloths cover His head, 
That hath, at last, whereon to rest; a rocky bed. 
 
       Come! for the pangs are done, 
       That overcast the sun, 
              So bright to-day! 
   And moved the Roman soldier: come away! 
Hath sorrow more to weep? Hath pity more to say? 
 
         Why wilt thou linger yet? 
         Think on dark Olivet; 
                On Calvary stem: 
   Think, from the happy birth at Bethlehem, 
To thus last woe and passion at Jerusalem! 
 
        This only can be said: 
        He loved us all; is dead; 
                 May rise again. 
 But if He rise not? Over the far main, 
The sun of glory falls indeed: the stars are plain. (1888) 

IN HIS TEXTUAL NOTES TO "A BURDEN OF EASTER VIGIL" IN THE COLLECTED Poems of Lionel Johnson, Ian Fletcher comments that "the title has a Preraphaelite suggestion" (1) and cites statements by A. J. Farmer that "Johnson est ici tout pres d'Arnold et ces premieres verses portent deja l'empreinte de la souffrance intime qui est la racon d'un age, trop avide de certitude" and (incorrectly) by A. W Patrick, who "compares lines 16-20 with the final stanza of Arnold's 'Obermann.'" (2) While the Pre-Raphaelite suggestion could possibly refer to D. G. Rossetti's "The Burden of Nineveh" and the influence of Arnold on Johnson especially during his formative years at Winchester had been profound, (3) there is another possible--although seemingly unlikely--source for the poem: Arthur Hugh Clough's "Easter Day. Naples, 1849."

There is, indeed, ample evidence to show that Johnson never found a source of inspiration, spiritual or otherwise, in Clough as he had in his mentors, Arnold, Pater, and Newman. In fact, he severely criticized Clough's poetry as being overweighted with thought and morality and lacking in artistic excellence. Contrasting Clough with D. G. Rossetti, for example, he concluded, "One verse of the 'Blessed Damozel' is to me worth the whole of 'Dipsychus,' do you feel that?" (Winchester Letters, p. 164). And again: "There is more delight in the structure of a sonnet or villanelle, the cadence of a verse, than in heavy analysis of a foggy soul: Rossetti …