Lyric Poem · Nature

Hayeswater

by Matthew Arnold

Reading room

1A region desolate and wild.

2Black, chafing water: and afloat,

3And lonely as a truant child

4In a waste wood, a single boat:

5No mast, no sails are set thereon;

6It moves, but never moveth on:

7And welters like a human thing

8Amid the wild waves weltering.

9Behind, a buried vale doth sleep,

10Far down the torrent cleaves its way:

11In front the dumb rock rises steep,

12A fretted wall of blue and grey;

13Of shooting cliff and crumbled stone

14With many a wild weed overgrown:

15All else, black water: and afloat,

16One rood from shore, that single boat.

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“Hayeswater” by Matthew Arnold — quilloak.com/poems/hayeswater

Quick facts

Poem: Hayeswater
Poet: Matthew Arnold
Length: 16 lines
Form: Lyric Poem
Themes: Nature, Childhood, Dreams & Sleep

Craft notes

How this poem works

Measured from the text on this page, not copied from a summary. Counts are approximate: syllables and rhymes come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, which models General American English, so dialect, older pronunciation, and performance can all change what you hear.

Shape: 16 lines · 2 octaves
Line length: Mostly 8-syllable lines (tetrameter length).

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Text, source & rights

A traceable edition

Full-text display is based on the committed source record and a United States term-expiry review.

Author record: Matthew Arnold1822–1888
Source record: PoetryDBHayeswater by matthew-arnold, PoetryDB transcription
Display decision: Full text · United States · reviewed 2026-07-18
Publication record: Not recorded in the imported source
Text fingerprint: SHA-256 08cb692e12c66ba7…
Editorial handling: Whitespace and stanza breaks normalized for web display; no material wording change recorded.

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Lyric Poem Nature Childhood Dreams & Sleep

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