You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Matthew Arnold's poem The Buried Life has received only glancing critical attention that somehow falls short in the attempt to explain its resonance and its powerful effect on the reader. Lionel Trilling lauds The Buried Life for its revelation of the “psychological phenomenon of the distortion of purpose and self and the assumption of a manner to meet the world,”1 which hardly accounts for the potency of Arnold's vision. Park Honan's recent study describes the love relationship in The Buried Life as “a means of self-discovery and of help to the individual's deepest identity.”2 Yet the symbolic way in which self-discovery is achieved is not shown.
The force of this poem lies in its subterranean movement. Alan Roper has faulted Arnold for “discontinuous” metaphors and “attempts to render an imperfectly understood perception.”3 But Arnold's figures of speech complement each other and his perception is universal if we look for meaning in the “buried” text of the poem.
It is what Freud termed “the constant struggle for primacy over affectivity” between the conscious and unconscious4 which is expressed in The Buried Life. Freud stated that the unconscious was characterized by “exemption from mutual contradiction, primary process (mobility of cathexis), timelessness, and replacement of external by psychical reality.”5 He added that these processes become evident in neuroses and dreams. If we read Arnold's poem as having on one level the quality of a dream, we find that it offers the (disguised) fulfillment of a (repressed) wish.