SOHRAB AND RUSTUM, by Matthew Arnold (published 1853), is perhaps the most important classical English poem since Words worth. Its theme— the combat of a father with his son in ignorance of their kinship— involves central human relations in love and in war, and gives full scope for pathos, tragic irony, and the classical sense of fate. These are conveyed in 891 blank verse lines of clear and measured narrative, with passages of de scription and dialogue, full of sonorous names after the manner of Milton, and of elaborate similes and other reminiscences of Homer and the Greek tragic poets; so that the focal and universal theme, which even if unembellished would have appealed to all men, is given every means of evoking in instructed readers the peculiarly classical aesthetic effect of modified remembrance and recognition. Yet the poem does not in the least suggest a cento; its action, which, as an or rather epyllion, takes us at once in medias res, carries all off with a masterly epic stride; while perhaps the most celebrated passage — that in which, at the end of the poem, the course of the river Oxus is followed to the sea— is modern in its feeling for the resolution of all human discords in nature's serene disregard of them. Compari
son of the narrative structure of