88 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



Oh, that its waves were flowing over me ! 

 Oh, that I saw its grains of yellow silt 

 Roll tumbling in the current o'er my head ! 



In these lines, Arnold was evidently influenced by Helen's "gentle 

 words," II. 6:345 ff.: "Would that on the day when my mother bore 

 me at the first, an evil storm-wind had caught me away to a mountain 

 or a billow of the loud-sounding sea, where the billow might have swept 

 me away before all these things came to pass." Compare Tenny- 

 son's adaptation, in "A Dream of Fair Women" — 



I would the white cold heavy plunging foam, 

 WhirPd by the wind, had roll'd me deep below, 

 Then when I left my home. 



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Fear not ! as thou hast said, Sohrab, my son, 



So shall it be; for I will burn my tents, 



And quit the host, and bear thee hence with me, 



And carry thee away to Seistan, 



And place thee on a bed, and mourn for thee, 



With the snow-headed Zal, and all my friends. 



And I will lay thee in that lovely earth, 



And heap a stately mound above thy bones, 



And plant a far-seen pillar over all, 



And men shall not forget thee in thy grave. 



No other passage in "Sohrab and Rustum" illustrates better Arnold's 

 complete absorption of the Homeric manner and the skill and felicity 

 with which he constantly combined detached Homeric phrases, and 

 situations drawn or adapted from various parts of the poems, into a 

 harmonious whole. In accordance with the Homeric manner this speech 

 of Rustum is a repetition, mutatis mutandis, of the words of Sohrab, the 

 other party to the dialogue. The Homeric passages drawn upon are 77. 

 24:6699.: "All this, O ancient Priam, shall be as thou biddest; for 

 I will hold back the battle even so long a time as thou tellest me;" II. 

 22:352 ff.: "Not even so shall thy lady mother lay thee on a bed and 

 mourn her son" (compare II. 22:86 f.); and II. 16:671 ff.: "And send 

 him to be wafted by fleet convoy, by the twin brothers Sleep and Death, 

 that quickly will set him in the land of wide Lycia. There will his kins- 



