Poem Of The Week: 'The Latest Decalogue' By Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861)

There is a refreshing directness to the poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough which makes of him a man out of his own time. Standing at a philosophical tangent to the rigid compass of High Victorian religious observance – he infamously denied the Resurrection - Clough’s vigorous rattles through the landscape of Britain’s hinterlands are epicurean delights, often dressed in momentum-sustaining hexameters. Curios in the mid-nineteenth century literary milieu, Clough’s poems yield a surprise as fresh and effervescent as Hopkins’ feeling for ‘sprung’ rhythm.

The poet’s intuitive antipathy to the hypocrisy of an era devoted to imperial expansion and economic hegemony, of enormous disparities of income and abject poverty, sometimes provokes an urge to satire. In ‘The Latest Decalogue’ the Liverpool-born Clough’s focus falls upon that central tenet of Christian belief, the Commandments, in order to unpick the iniquity of its strictest adherents, whose alignment of personal interest with the idea of faith precipitates a complete misappropriation of the biblical injunction.

Rendering his verse in strict rhyming tetrameters, Clough pastiches the solemn intonation of the utterance, the better to establish a sabotaging inversion in each succeeding line. And, as the poem unfolds, his approach works to comprehensive effect, exposing layer upon layer of venality and self-interest. That the central couplet – ‘Thou shalt not kill; but need'st not strive / Officiously to keep alive’ – has been misinterpreted in court rooms and on medical ethics committees since Clough conceived the lines, is one measure of the poem’s widespread significance.

The two-tiered inconsistency of Victorian culture and worship – the silk hats and family pews; the rich man’s castle and the poor man’s gate – are brought summarily to book in an era of burgeoning Doubt.


‘The Latest Decalogue’ is taken from English Verse: 1830-1890, Edited by Bernard Richards (1980).