25 pages • 50 minutes read
Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse
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Symbols & Motifs
Garden and Flowers
Flowers, herbs, and gardens are a recurring motif in the poem. In the first stanza, for example, the Alpine valley is “thick” with crocuses, a six-petalled, lush flower which comes in many colors (Line 2). Crocuses are a native species in the region the speaker is travelling; their description is factually correct. On a deeper, symbolic level, they reflect the speaker’s (briefly) happy state of mind and the simple harmony of nature, since the flowers are thriving in their natural habitat. The flower motif disappears after the first stanza, reappearing only in Line 55, with fragrant herbs flowering in the monastery’s garden. Again, the reference to gardens, blooming, and flowers occurs in the context of a brief, contained moment of joy. Absorbed in their task of tending to plants, the monks are happy; the garden is their one moment of delight in an otherwise harsh daily routine. The garden is associated with “cheerful tasks beneath the sun” (Line 60), a sharp contrast to the “humid corridors” (Line 34) of the life of the monks inside the monastery. Thus, a garden represents a fleeting moment of wholesome joy.
The garden symbolism returns for a third and final time in the poem’s final stanza, but this time the garden—which is not referenced explicitly—is shaded. It is described as a patch of green “beneath some old-world abbey wall” (Line 170), where the monastery’s children are “rear’d in shade” (Line 169) like stunted trees or plants. These “plants” cannot thrive because “deep, deep the greenwood round them waves” (Line 173); the wood’s trees block their sunlight. Symbolically, the moment of the garden’s perfection is over: it is now in decay, just like the lifestyle of the monks. The monks and the speaker plaintively ask, “How should we grow in other ground? / How can we flower in foreign air?” (Lines 208-9). They are not the crocuses of the alpine valley, blooming in their rightful habitat. The entire world is foreign soil to them, which is why they ask the revelers to leave them to their “desert” (Line 211); the green imagery gives way to a barren landscape.
This garden symbolism is linked with Biblical imagery as well. Like Adam and Eve before they tasted the fruit of knowledge, the monks can be briefly happy in their garden too. However, just as the walled garden of Eden was a temporary state of being for Adam and Eve, so is the innocent perfection of the life of the monks in their cloistered garden. They must either taste the fruit of knowledge or decay. Thus, the poem underlines the inevitability of change.
The Carthusian Monks
According to the speaker, the monks seem difficult to comprehend vividly or fully; in fact, the landscape and the spires of their monastery make a more solid impression than the fleeting forms of the monks. They are introduced in Line 35 as “ghostlike in the deepening night,” with their “cowl’d forms” (Line 36) brushing past each other in silence. Their faces are “white” (Line 41) or “wan” (Line 43) at various points, and often disappear into their cowls. Only in Stanza 33-35, when the monks are given a voice, does their identity become more concrete. Still, it should be noted that this voice is imaginary, a projection of the speaker’s thoughts onto the monks.
The deliberate distancing of the reader from the monks establishes their life as utterly foreign to a modern or contemporary individual. Thus, the monks are symbols of a reality lost to the speaker and the reader, a dying tradition. Of course, the reality of the monks’ lives may be entirely different from the perception of the speaker; the Carthusian order still exists in France in the twenty-first century, with the Grande Chartreuse as its head monastery. The order supports itself by preparing Chartreuse, a popular, green liqueur made of distilled alcohol aged with 130 herbal and flower extracts. Thus, the life of the monks may only appear stunted to the speaker; the monks themselves may in fact be more industrious and active than he depicts. In this sense, the monks symbolize the speaker’s sense of self-doubt and his own distance from religion.
Water and Sea
Water imagery is a common element in Arnold’s poems. Water can be beautiful and life-giving (as in the soft rain of the poem’s opening, Lines 1-2) or aggressive (as in the wind-driven shower in Stanza 2). It can even be downright terrifying, as “Dead Guier's stream” suggests in Line 10. (“Dead Guier” is a translation of Guier Mort, a stream in the Chartreuse Mountains.)
The mutability of water makes it a potent symbol of ambiguity, sadness, and liminal states. In “Dover Beach” (see Related Poems), Arnold describes the sea of faith as retreating, till he can hear only its melancholy, withdrawing roar. In another poem, “The Forsaken Merman” (1849), an abandoned merman and his children are caught between the world underwater and the land-bound world of the wife and mother who left them.
These themes continue in “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” where the water fountains of the monastery are “icy,” with cold symbolizing winter and death. When the speaker feels confused, he describes himself as a Greek explorer standing on “some far northern strand” (Line 80), or shore, contemplating the ruins of past civilizations. The imagery evoked here is of land surrounded by water, which signals the unknown.
The speaker laments that the sea of time, watered by the tears of “our fathers” (Line 121), “raves” (Line 125) around humans, who they look at it mutely. Here, the sea symbolizes time, tradition, and eternity. The methods by which past generations navigated this sea (as well as the punishing “hail” of adversity, Line 124) are lost to modern people; thus, Arnold’s contemporaries are frozen in inaction before the sea’s challenge. The poets Byron and Shelly are also mentioned in the context of coasts; the “Ætolian shore” (Line 135) refers to Missolonghi in Western Greece, where Byron died. “Soft blue Spezzian bay” (Line 142) denotes the west coast of Italy, where Shelley spent his final days. The association of these poets with coastlines is grimly fatalistic. Though they successfully navigated the sea of time, their discoveries are unavailable to the next generations of poets.
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By Matthew Arnold
