The Struggle is Not Nothing: Hope in Time of Despair

Arthur Hugh Clough’s “Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth” is a poem for the weary. Not for the triumphant, nor for the newly inspired, but for those who have begun to fear that their effort may be pointless.

Clough does not begin with triumph. He begins with correction:

Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain…

The voice is not rousing but argumentative. He does not cry “Victory!” or predict success; he simply challenges a conclusion. You may think the struggle is useless, he says  –  but you may be wrong.

Take heart! Look again

The poem proceeds to dismantle futility and despair through analogy.

First, the battlefield: smoke obscures the fight. You see no advance; the enemy seems unshaken. Yet elsewhere, unseen, the line may already be breaking.

Second, the sea: the waves appear “tired” and “vainly breaking,” yet far back “through creeks and inlets” the tide is silently flooding in.

Third, the sunrise: light spreads across the sky while the sun itself remains below the horizon.

In each case, change is real but indirect. Progress is happening  –  though not always where you expect it. This is encouragement for sceptics, not romantics.

Clough himself was no easy optimist. His life was marked by religious doubt and intellectual scruple. He distrusted rhetoric and distrusted consolation even more. He reasons hope into being  –  not through blind faith, but by logic and argument.

Clough’s Plain and Steady Voice 

Clough never possessed the orchestral swell of Tennyson or the sonorous melancholy of his friend and brother‑in‑law Matthew Arnold. Tennyson sings, Arnold laments, but Clough argues. This poem speaks in a plainer voice  –  morally earnest, searching, wary of grandeur. That modesty of tone is precisely what gives it staying power.

Thomas Sergeant Perry, writing in The Atlantic in 1875, claimed that “the most carping criticism can find no fault with these lines.” It’s a bit of a backhanded compliment but it fits. The poem does not rouse and declaim; it resists despair. There is no jingoistic music‑hall chant of “Are we downhearted? No!”  –  only steadiness, and the refusal of false bravado.

Part of its memorability lies in its sound. The long a vowels  –  vain, availeth, faileth  – create a steady, almost incantatory movement. It feels tidal, enacting the very principle it describes. Margaret Drabble once observed that the lines about the “tired waves, vainly breaking” unfailingly bring tears to her eyes. I’m with her. That double movement – apparent failure followed by quiet flooding success – is the emotional engine of the poem. It admits disappointment first. Only then does it offer hope.

Clough rejects the cheap slogan: Try hard and you will succeed. Failure is possible. Wounds are real. The labour may look wasted. But appearances mislead.

1849: After Failure and Set-back, Perseverance

Clough wrote the poem in 1849, and the date matters. The revolutions of 1848 had failed across Europe; liberal optimism had collapsed. The great Chartist meeting on London’s Kennington Common on 10 April 1848, once heralded as a “monster” demonstration, was defeated by torrential rain and the overwhelming presence of police and military.

Clough followed such movements closely. He keenly knew the feeling of despair and disappointment.

Read in that light, the poem is encouragement to continue: to recognise that change sometimes comes through long struggle and may flood in when you cannot even see it happening. History often advances incrementally –  slowly, then all at once. This was certainly true of the demands of the defeated Chartists, almost all of whose goals would be met in the ensuing decades of slow parliamentary reform.

This combination of hope and realism may explain the poem’s enduring appeal. It has been quoted by reformers, labour movements, and wartime leaders precisely because it sustains morale without illusion. Churchill sent it to Roosevelt in early 1941, months before America entered the Second World War. In moments when defeat seems possible, bombast rings hollow. Clough’s steady logic – that progress can be invisible – is more bracing.

Clough v. Arnold

Clough’s poem is a sharp contrast with the pessimism of Arnold’s “Dover Beach” . Arnold sees the “Sea of Faith” retreating, leaving modern humanity stranded on a “darkling plain”; his is the poetry of loss. Clough uses almost the same natural imagery – sea, light, cyclical motion – to argue the opposite case. The tide returns. Hope quietly floods in. The light spreads. What seems to wane may already be waxing elsewhere.

The poem endures because it avoids the traps of Victorian uplift:

• no sentimentality 
• no grand prophecy 
• no promise of glory 

Instead it offers a disciplined act of perception: look again; you may be misreading the scene.

Two Anthologies, One Companion

For me, the endurance of Clough’s poem is not only historical but personal. Among the things I brought back from England this January are two poetry anthologies that belonged to my parents.

In the first –  Palgrave’s Golden Treasury  – there is an inscription on the flyleaf:

They were not yet married. War had just been declared. My father had previously served in Palestine in 1936 and was in the Territorial Army, so by September 1939 he would already have received his call-up papers. By the 9th, he was likely preparing to embark for France as part of the BEF.

The book falls easily open at several places – Byron and Browning as well as Clough. I do not know whether this means those poems were often read, or whether the spine has simply loosened there by chance. But all three poets speak, in different ways, of separation, love, endurance, struggle, and danger. Clough’s poem belongs there.

The second book  –  An Eton Book of Poetry –  bears another name inside: H. V. Slade.* I was curious. Who was Slade and how did my father come to possess this particular volume? Turns out Slade was managing director of Garrard Manufacturing, the factory where my father worked his final job as a security guard: two weeks on nights, two weeks on days, plus Saturday mornings – twelve-hour shifts, a brutal, soul-destroying schedule.

On the night shift, when the factory was quiet, there was sometimes time to read. He read Slade’s book. How he came by it, I do not know. Slade died in 1961. Perhaps the book was discarded. Perhaps it was a gift. Perhaps it simply changed hands. Who knows.

But my father read it.

And there too is Clough’s poem.

It seems a small thing: the same Victorian lyric appearing in two well-handled anthologies, decades apart, across war and factory floors, and now across an ocean. Yet that is how such poems endure –  not as monuments, but as companions.

Clough does not promise victory. Only that the struggle is not nothing.

For a soldier about to cross the Channel in 1939, and for an older man on a twelve-hour night shift decades later, that may have been enough.

Across war, factory floors, and now an ocean and generations, that quiet defiance endures. It is not a call to triumph, nor a moral exhortation. It is a companion for those who keep going, even when progress is slow, unseen, or uncertain.

*Herbert Vaughan Slade (1889- 1961) was the driving force behind Garrard Engineering and Manufacturing Company, historically regarded as Swindon’s second most important industrial employer after the Great Western Railway.  

His name is on the flyleaf of this Eton Book of Poetry.

As managing director of Garrards he had a legendary commitment to quality and superiority when it came to turntables – 

“We will sell a Garrard in the U.S. only when it is more advanced than any machine made there.”  

 

Featured image: Centre: Claude Monet, The Seacoast of Pourville, Low Tide, 1882
Image at foot of the poem: Caspar David Friedrich, Morgen im Riesengebirge, 1810