For Keats, the nightingale uttered a wordless, melancholic beauty that Biblical Ruth also heard. A glimpse of time past proves consoling. When Arnold looks out a window onto Dover beach, he instead hears the "grating roar" caused by the waves of the English Channel as they strike the shoreline at the base of the great chalk cliffs; and he thinks of the "mournful roar" of which Sophocles wrote in Antigone. At poem's end, Arnold also remembers the chaotic night-battle at Epipolae when Athenian warriors, unable to see, killed friend and enemy alike.
Time past for Arnold forewarns humanity of its sad destiny. Keats escaped the miseries of his present by entering the afterdeath ecstasy of the nightingale's world. Arnold escaped ancient reminders of "human misery," "alarm and flight," by dwelling on present tenderness: a calm sea, sweet night-air, and his beloved by his side.
Time past, yoked to time present, reveals how fragile is the basis of human happiness. Keats closes his ode, asking if he dreams or wakes. Arnold ends his lyric, leaving no doubt that our "land of dreams" is a sham. Both men say that the imagination acts as the gateway between present and past. At first, the mind fixes on haunting music from nature: the nightingale's song, and the waves' "tremulous cadence slow.
For Arnold, it is a passage in Sophocles; Keats refers only to the "viewless wings" of poetry, but he is soon to think consciously of the Bible, and possibly of Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper.
For that reason, such poetry is "occasional": its unique insight rises from an instant of immediate experience and binds that moment permanently to something in long-term memory. Arnold makes explicit the formula by which everyone finds meaningfulness in an experience.
