The Forsaken Merman by Matthew Arnold
Quick answer: The Forsaken Merman by Matthew Arnold analysed: the sea-king abandoned by his human wife, the poem's tidal music, and its craft lessons for modern poets.
Most abandonment poems are spoken by the human left behind. Arnold's 1849 masterpiece reverses the lens: the deserted one is a merman, king of the sea's depths, standing on the shore with his children and calling after Margaret, the mortal woman who left the underwater world to save her soul and never came back. The poem is his voice through one long, failing vigil, half lullaby, half lament.
Written when Arnold was in his twenties, before the gravities of Sohrab and Rustum, The Forsaken Merman is his most musical poem and one of the most purely beautiful things in Victorian literature. It also asks a question that has not aged: what does faith cost the people it leaves behind? This guide follows the story, the sound, and the stealable craft.
What the poem says
The poem begins in urgency: come, dear children, let us away, down and away below. The merman is on the shore, and the tide is turning. He tells the children to call their mother once more, since a mother's ear may catch the voices of the children she bore, and the calls go up: Margaret! Margaret! But the town across the bay gives back nothing, and piece by piece, through the merman's retelling, we learn what happened.
Margaret lived with him in the caverns below the sea, in a ceiled chamber of amber and pearl, among sea-beasts and sea-snakes, and she was queen there. But at Easter she heard, far above, the sound of the church bell from the little grey town, and feared for her soul. She begged leave to go up and pray, promising to return, and the merman let her go, and waited, and she did not come back. He took the children up through the surf to find her: they saw her through the church window, her eyes fixed on the holy book, deaf to their calls at the door. She would not look.
Now she sits in the town, spinning, singing of joy, blessed by the priest, and mostly happy, except that the poem gives her two devastating leaks in that happiness: her eye strays to the sand and the shells, and a sorrow fills her at the memory of the cold strange eyes of a little mermaiden and the gleam of her children under the sea. The merman, for his part, accepts the loss without cursing her. The closing movement is the saddest resignation in Victorian verse: he and the children will return to their kingdom, and forever after, at midnights when winds blow and moonlight silvers the town, they will rise to the shore and gaze at it, singing that she left lonely forever the kings of the sea.
How it works
The poem's form is irregular by design: lines stretch and contract, rhymes gather and disperse, stanzas swell and break like the water they describe. Arnold, elsewhere the apostle of classical architecture, here writes pure tidal movement, and the match of form to matter is total. Read it aloud and the long rolling lines of the sea passages give way to short, urgent calls, then subside again.
Repetition is the emotional instrument. The cries of Margaret's name, the repeated summons to the children, the phrases that return like waves returning: the poem is constructed as ritual calling, and each repetition comes back a little more hopeless than the last. This is incremental refrain used for grief, where Kipling would later use it for dread.
The imagery divides the poem's two worlds with great precision. Below: amber ceilings, pale-green sea-groves, whales with unshut eyes circling the world. Above: the white-walled town, the narrow paved streets, the shrill wheel, the holy well. The sea is vast, strange, and loving; the town is small, ordered, and cold, and the poem's sympathies, remarkably for 1849, are with the pagan deep. Margaret is never condemned, but the salvation she chooses is rendered as a shutting of doors, of eyes, of ears.
Why it lasts
The Forsaken Merman lasts first as sound: it is one of the poems teachers use to demonstrate that free-ranging form can still be exact music. But its staying power is also thematic. Arnold spent his career anatomising the ebb of faith; here, before his famous statements of doubt, he wrote the question as a fairy tale, and it cuts deeper for wearing that disguise. The poem does not ask whether Margaret's religion is true. It asks what her observance costs the merman and the children, and it lets the cost stand unanswered.
The reversal of perspective keeps it modern. Giving the lament to the inhuman husband, the outsider the church cannot see, anticipates a whole contemporary genre of poems spoken from the excluded side of a door. Readers who have been left, for a belief, a calling, a better life, recognise this shore immediately.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the reversed speaker. Take a familiar story of leaving, and give the poem to the one who was left, especially if that figure is usually denied a voice. Sympathy relocated is originality of the most honest kind.
Steal the two furnished worlds as well: build each of your poem's opposed places from concrete inventory and let the reader feel where the warmth actually lives. And study the fade ending. The poem does not end at the height of grief but in its long aftermath, the ritual of returning to gaze at the town forever. Ending on repetition-to-come, on grief become habit, is often truer and stronger than ending on the wound itself.
What poets can take from this
- Give the lament to the figure tradition leaves silent.
- Let line length and rhyme placement move like your poem's landscape.
- Repeat calls and names with diminishing hope to structure grief.
- Furnish opposed worlds with concrete objects and let inventory argue.
- End on grief turned to ritual rather than on the moment of loss.
Try it yourself
Write a poem spoken by a non-human or outsider figure calling a loved one back from a world that will not acknowledge the speaker exists, and end with the vigil becoming a permanent habit.
Questions
What is The Forsaken Merman about?
A merman is abandoned by his human wife Margaret, who returns to land at Easter to pray for her soul and never comes back to the sea. The poem is his lament, spoken to their children, and it weighs the claims of religious duty against the love and family it abandons.
Does Margaret regret leaving in The Forsaken Merman?
Partly, and the poem is careful about it. She is shown mostly content in the town, spinning and singing, but her eyes stray to the shells and a sorrow rises when she remembers her children under the sea. Arnold gives her happiness a permanent leak without condemning her choice outright.
What form is The Forsaken Merman written in?
Irregular verse with varying line lengths and shifting rhyme patterns, shaped to move like tides and waves. The repetitions of names and calls act as refrains, giving the poem its ebbing, incantatory music.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.