"Where ignorant armies clash by night" and the Sikh rebellion: a contemporary source for Matthew Arnold's night-battle imagery.

From: Victorian Poetry | Date: March 22, 2005| Author: | Copyright information

The source for the night-battle imagery that concludes Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach"--"And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night" (ll. 35-38)--is almost unanimously thought to be a passage from Thucydides' account of the night battle of Epipolae: 

 
   By this time the Athenians were getting into a state of so great 
   confusion and perplexity that it has not been easy to learn from 
   either side just how the several events occurred. In the daytime 
   things are clearer, of course, yet ...

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