Arthur Hugh Clough

Life is Struggle

To wear out heart, and nerves, and brain
And give oneself a world of pain;

Catalog of striving

Clough lists contradictory qualities—'eager' vs 'supple,' 'fierce' vs 'imperious'—showing how struggle forces us to be everything at once, not just one coherent self.

Be eager, angry, fierce, and hot,
Imperious, supple—God knows what,
For what's all one to have or not;

The worthless prize

This is the poem's central paradox: we exhaust ourselves for things that are 'all one to have or not'—interchangeable, meaningless. Yet we can't stop.

O false, unwise, absurd, and vain!
For 'tis not joy, it is not gain,
It is not in itself a bliss,
Only it is precisely this
That keeps us all alive.
To say we truly feel the pain,
And quite are sinking with the strain;—

Victorian self-deception

'Entirely, simply, undeceived' is ironic—he claims total clarity about not caring, then immediately goes back to trying. The self-awareness doesn't help.

Entirely, simply, undeceived,
Believe, and say we ne'er believed
The object, e'en were it achieved,
A thing we e'er had cared to keep;
With heart and soul to hold it cheap,
And then to go and try it again;

Knowing better, doing anyway

The brutal honesty: we convince ourselves the goal is worthless, believe it completely, then 'go and try it again.' Consciousness changes nothing.

O false, unwise, absurd, and vain I
O, 'tis not joy, and 'tis not bliss,
Only it is precisely this

Refrain shift

The refrain changes from 'keeps us all alive' to 'keeps us still alive'—that word 'still' adds exhaustion, like we're barely hanging on.

That keeps us still alive.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Clough's Crisis of Faith and Effort

CONTEXT Clough resigned his Oxford fellowship in 1848 rather than subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. This poem comes from that period of religious doubt and vocational uncertainty—he'd given up security for principle, then found himself adrift.

The poem reads like a man watching himself struggle and finding it absurd. Notice how 'false, unwise, absurd, and vain' appears twice, like a refrain of self-disgust. Yet the poem's argument is that this very absurdity—this pointless striving for things we know are worthless—is what 'keeps us all alive.'

Clough is diagnosing a specifically Victorian problem: what happens when you lose faith in the object of your efforts (God, career, social advancement) but can't stop the mechanism of striving? The poem suggests struggle isn't a means to an end—it's the end itself. We're built to exhaust ourselves, and stopping would be death.

The second stanza gets even darker. The speaker claims total clarity—'entirely, simply, undeceived'—about not caring whether he achieves his goals. He can 'hold it cheap / With heart and soul' and still 'go and try it again.' Self-knowledge changes nothing. This is Clough's answer to Victorian self-help: consciousness of the trap doesn't free you from it.

The Mechanics of Pointless Motion

Watch the verbs: 'wear out,' 'give,' 'be,' 'have,' 'say,' 'feel,' 'believe,' 'hold,' 'go,' 'try.' They're all exhausting, contradictory actions. The poem is structured as two parallel stanzas that both reach the same conclusion—we know it's pointless, we do it anyway.

The rhyme scheme ABABCCDEEFFGG creates a sense of circling back—the couplets pile up like rationalizations that go nowhere. And those refrains: 'O false, unwise, absurd, and vain!' followed by 'Only it is precisely this / That keeps us [all/still] alive.' The exclamation of disgust crashes into flat acceptance.

'Precisely this'—the demonstrative pronoun is doing heavy work. What keeps us alive isn't joy or meaning, but 'this': the grinding, self-aware, pointless struggle itself. Clough won't even dignify it with a noun. It's just the motion of living, the metabolic process of wanting things you know are worthless.